In the current issue of the New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, a Paris Postcard by Lauren Collins: on-line on 8/7, with the title “Bartender, There’s a Beer in My Wine: Paris has been blanketed by posters for vière, a mix of vin and bière drunk from a wineglass, whose name, its creators say, started out as a joke”; in print on 8/14, with the title “Vière here” — about the hybrid beverage with a portmanteau name. Beginning:

Remember the Cronut? The Frankensteinian pastry — half croissant, half doughnut — was so popular upon its introduction, in 2013, that New Yorkers waited in line for hours to taste one. Or else they hired Cronut scalpers to wait for them, paying up to a hundred dollars for a single hunk of glazed dough. The Cronut’s creator, Dominique Ansel, trademarked the name, which led to the appearance of imitation treats: fauxnuts, cronies, zonuts, frissants. Not all hybrid foods are created equal, but as brunch, Spam, turducken, pluots, Craisins, and zoodles demonstrate, you’re halfway there with a catchy [AZ: portmanteau] name.

Recently, in Paris, posters appeared all over town advertising an unfamiliar beverage: vière. “Du jamais bu,” one poster punned — “Never before drunk.” It came in a [750]-millilitre glass bottle, just like a Chablis or a Marsannay. The bottle had a metal cap, the kind you might pry off the top of a Heineken. “It’s not a typo,” Gallia, the drink’s manufacturer explained, on its Web site, … adding that “we wanted to switch things up by combining two malts that we love.” Vin (wine) + bière (beer) = vière.

I suppose the English version would be weer [wir] (< wine [wajn] + beer [bir]), but that just sounds weird, or suggests weir [wir] ‘type of low dam’.

French vière [vjɛr] brings with it a larger and more entertaining assortment of irrelevant associations: vielle [vjɛl] ‘hurdy-gurdy; barrel organ’, vieille [vjɛj] ‘old’ (fem. gender), Vienne [vjɛn] ‘Vienna’, and vierge [vjɛrž] ‘virgin’. The hurdy-gurdy plays mournfully for the old virgin from Vienna.

I’m sorry, but vière is a really silly word, whatever you might think of a wine + beer drink.

The donut burger is the centerpiece of a photo on Jenny Marinello’s Facebook page on 8/5, from the Ohio State Fair (the booth in the photo also touts Philly fries and butt fries, which will require some explication for many readers). The sign on the booth reassures us that these are real, fresh donuts, and we are in fact looking at shamelessly sweet and sticky glazed donuts here, not some earnest wimpy-hippie fried dough:

The DONUT BURGER, a burger with doughnuts for buns: not, it turns out, just some freakish state fair attraction, but a genuine cultural thing

Now, brief notes: on hybrid food, with and without portmanteau names (the donut burger currently lacks one); and then on six places around the SF BayArea where you can get donut burgers (the glazed donut as bun is standard). So far as I know, they aren’t available in chain burger places, and the fashion for them might pass, but then again they might be a coming thing.

Names. Start with my 4/3/19 posting “Another hybrid food, no portmanteau name”, about the bagel quiche (biche would have been a bad move, for reasons I explain in my posting); and more generally about hybrid dishes and their foodmanteau names: cronuts, cruffins, wonuts, bisnuts, tofurkey, quesaritos, tomatonaise, crossanwiches, eggocado, jalapiño, craisins, and more. Like the bagel quiche, the donut burger lacks a foodmanteau name: the dorger? the dohnger? the donger (whether /dan-gǝr/, /daŋgǝr/. or /daŋǝr/)? (I doubt that a name with dong in it would fly.)

Bay Area donut burgers. From the SF Eater site, “Six Heart-stopping Burgers with Doughnuts /Buns: Life is short, so use doughnuts for buns” by Ellen Fort on 4.17/15, one example:

[SF’s] Little Griddle’s Lucifer burger is a straightforward version of the doughnut burger, sandwiching an all-beef patty with American cheese and bacon between glazed doughnuts. Sugary, beefy and bacony, all in one.

No doubt such places can be found in other large American cities. (Of course, you could make your own; glazed donuts are ridiculously easy to come by.)

Note on the fries in the Ohio State Fair photo. Philly fries turn out to be Philly cheesesteak fries — that is, fries with Philly cheesesteak on the fries instead of in a bun. Sort of an American cousin of poutine.

Butt fries — note the monumentally crude name, no doubt a selling point in itself — are described in several sources as from the end of a potato when it’s sliced to be made into waffle fries. Some people deprecate them for their texture, others value them for it. I like super-crispy fries, so I’m not likely to venture into butt fries.

Provoked by the Merriam-Webster site‘s “Words We’re Watching: ‘Nibling’: An efficient word for your sibling’s kids”: some reflections on the portmanteauing that gives rise to nibling ‘niece or nephew, sibling’s child’; on “having a word for X in language L”; and on neologism and its discontents.

First, the fun. There’s a book for kids, and there’s a t-shirt for kids, too.

The book. The Great Nibling by Darcy Nybo, illustrated by Marion Townsend (Artistic Warrior, 2022):

(#1) The book’s cover

The publisher’s blurb:

Ray is having a great day at the beach. Then his gramma tells him her sister is coming to the beach and she can’t wait to see the Great Nibling!

Ray imagines all sorts of wonderful people, places and things that could be the Great Nibling. Is it on the beach? Is it on the ocean? Is it under the ocean? Or is it magical or invisible?

Join Ray as he discovers who or what the Great Nibling really is!

The t-shirt. On the Whimsikid (Original Designs for Original Kids!) site (whimsikid.com), a cotton kids’s tee — in white, butter. heather, garnet, and royal; the garnet tee:

(#2) From the site: “Nibling works for both nieces and nephews and it’s fun to say” — fun to say because of the homophony with the “cute” word nibbling, with an echo of scribble and kibble (and Tribble), maybe of nipple as well

And then there’s the possible contribution of the noun-forming suffix –ling; from Michael Quinion’s affixes site:

The ending has long had implications of smallness, especially when speaking of the young of animals or plants: duckling, gosling, fledgling, hatchling, oakling, spiderling, yearling. Occasionally terms are means affectionately, as in darling (Old English dēore, beloved). More commonly, the associations are negative: underling, weakling, princeling, lordling, godling.

That would allow for an analysis of nibling as nib (‘the pointed end part of a pen, which distributes the ink on the writing surface’ (NOAD)) + diminutive/derogatory –ling, so as referring to a cute little pen point (“I’m a little nibling, full of ink …”).x

The M-W site, with lots of details, and citations too.

What to Know: Nibling is a gender-neutral term used to refer to a child of one’s sibling as a replacement for “niece” or “nephew”. The word is thought to have been coined in the early 1950s, but was relatively obscure for several decades before being revived in recent years.

Are you someone who has a sibling or siblings with multiple offspring of varying genders you’d like to refer to efficiently? Would you like a single word that could apply generally to all of them, be they infants, wee ones, tween or teen ones, or even full-blown adults? Perhaps you’d appreciate a word that was something like the word sibling itself, which refers quite neatly to the other children of one’s parents, regardless of gender.

Well, we have some news: such a word exists. It’s not yet entered in our dictionaries, but it’s out there, and it’s being used with increasing frequency: nibling.

That’s right: nibling. Its ibling comes from sibling, of course, and its n comes from niece and nephew.

Origins of Nibling:The word’s coinage is widely credited to Samuel E. Martin, a professor of Far Eastern linguistics at Yale University who is better known for many things, among them developing a romanization system for transliterating Korean. The year 1951 is commonly attached to his coinage, but we’ve been unable to find the primary source information.

Nibling, however, mostly languished in linguistic obscurity for its first five decades of existence. Merriam-Webster received a letter from a writer in Blain, Pennsylvania, concerning the term in 1996, but the reply our correspondent received informed him that we had no evidence of it in use.

Increase in Use and Popularity: As the previous millennium has receded, however, nibling has started to show signs of life. We received another letter concerning the word in 2005, this time from a correspondent in Ft. Lauderdale. And evidence of the word in use began to appear in print as well, though more often on the other side of the proverbial pond:

Schoolchildren in Paulton are campaigning to get a new word into the English dictionary. They are urging friends and family to use the word ‘niblings’ instead of the phrase nieces and nephews in an attempt to earn it a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. — Chris Allen, The Bristol (UK) Post, 30 Apr. 2004

The Guardian recently published a report on a woman talking about her “auntistic” relationship with her “niblings.” You quickly realise that the words wrapped in ICs are “not real words” in the sense of existing in dictionaries (though that may change). Yet their meanings are clear: “auntistic” in the manner of an aunt; “nibling” an ingenious, gender-neutral collective term, on the model of “sibling,” for nephews and nieces. — Ruth Wajnryb, The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, 19 June 2004

In 2005, nibling was a runner-up in the New Word Challenge of the Independent on Sunday (London) newspaper, a contest run in collaboration with the good people at Collins Dictionary. The word is in fact entered in the Collins Dictionary, albeit as of 2012, and as a user-submitted term. Its “Approval Status” is “Pending Investigation.”

Examples closer to home exist as well:

In a recent column, I bemoaned the lack of a gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews. Lillian Kezerian of Hartford already has one — “niblings.” “It’s not original with me,” she writes, “and I honestly don’t remember where I first saw it. My nieces and nephews have liked it.” — Rob Kyff, The Hartford (Connecticut) Courant, 23 May 2006

As the second decade of the new century comes to a close, the word continues to be more common in the UK (and elsewhere) than in the US, but it is showing some signs of increased use here as well. In 2018 the word was featured in a trivia quiz in The Toledo (Ohio) Blade: “In the world of family relationships, what is a ‘nibling’?” The answer was “a niece or nephew.”

But in British sources, the term is undeniably less mysterious:

She looked delighted to be spending time with her goddaughter Leonor, who is the daughter of her brother André Sampaio, and was born in February 2017…. her darling nibling … — no byline, The Daily Mail (UK), 4 Nov. 2018

This is how it goes for my nephews and nieces (henceforth, niblings) each Christmas morn, when my packages finally reach their grubby little paws. Issued directly from the North Pole, these are their own, personal and private letters from Santa Claus
— Séamas O’Reilly, The Observer (London), 16 Dec. 2018

If nibling has for most of its history merely puttered along, it is now moving with new purpose. While initially considered useful for its efficiency, as seen in the Séamas O’Reilly quote immediately above, it is now increasingly called upon as a means to gender accuracy:

My “nibling,” the gender-neutral term for nephew or niece, is neither male nor female, but both. — “Proud Aunt,” “Ask Amy” in The Chicago Tribune, 9 Jan. 2014

There was that benevolent look for his genderqueer “nibling” (read: gender-neutral niece or nephew). It was big-eyed and full of wonder with a smile that gave you warmth. — Joey Hood, The Nashville (Tennessee) Scene, 23 June 2016

Another [fan] suggested the term “nibling” to the singer, which is widely considered a gender-neutral term for a sibling’s child. — Chantal Da Silva, The Independent (UK), 24 July 2017

Poke around a bit on the Internet and you will find that it is popping up all over, and being embraced with pleasure. The future of nibling at this point looks pretty bright.

Note the Nashville cite from 2016, where genderqueer is glossed (inadequately) as ‘gender-neutral’. The fuller story from NOAD, bringing in the contribution of identity politics:

adj. genderqueer: denoting or relating to a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders

Now, the great convenience of niblings is that it’s a single-word covering the unwieldy coordination nephews and nieces (or the unwieldy and technical-sounding siblings’ children). But the fact that nibling is neutral as to the sex of the referent (as English cousin is) meant that it could also be used by anyone seeking to downplay the role of sexual identity in social contexts, and some feminists adopted it for that reason.

Once nibling had picked up some tinge of sexual politics, it was open to pick up a tinge of gender politics as well (some genderqueer people find it a congenial usage), and trans politics as well (because it elides cis vs. trans identity as well as sexual identity and gender identity). Looking at an assortment of recent cites for nibling that I pulled up yesterday, I see a fair number associated with one or another of these political identities, as in the Nashville cite from M-W. It might be that this is the future of nibling usage.

nibling as a portmanteau. The n– of niece / nephew + the –ibling of sibling. Mighty harsh on niece / nephew, but then the n– is the only phonological content that the two words share. In any case, nibling is a coinage so obvious that it must have been portmanteaued into use many thousands of times; over the years, a handful of people have written me to claim that they were the (original) inventor, as if the first person in the world to utter some form — how could we possibly know who that was? — wins some kind of prize.

I’ll write below about Allan Metcalf’s work on the adoption of neologisms; in the context here, Metcalf’s point is that the important thing isn’t the invention — people invent new words all the time, searching in haste for a way to express an idea they have nothing simple off the shelf for, or just enjoying the pleasures of language play — but the spread of the invention, its adoption by others in some community of speakers.

Faced with a desire for a neat and easy way to refer to ‘niece or nephew’, I probably would not have taken the rocky portmanteau road, but traveled the broad highway of compounding instead, with sibkid.

Having a word for X in language L. The purpose of the M-W piece is to assess the status of nibling with respect to Merriam-Webster dictionaries. It’s been coined, again and again, but is it in suffciently general usage to merit inclusion these dictionaries? It’s not there yet, nor is it in NOAD or AHD5, but it seems to be moving in that direction. Currently in limbo, but looking towards lexical heaven.

Some background here. First, a posting of mine on Language Log on 12/2/06 “Does anyone have a word for this? Probably not.”:

I argue that a useful interpretation of word for X in language L is something like ‘ordinary-language fixed expression of some currency’ (olfesc)

In three parts: ordinary-language, fixed expression, and of some currency.

Some further context in my 7/29/09 posting “A word for it”:

The idea that everything has a name is widespread, but seriously mistaken, even if it’s understood as the claim that somewhere, at some time, someone has had a name specifically for the referent in question. If this were so, then little contests for suggesting words for things would have little point, but in fact they’re very popular, and only rarely do they unearth already existing words (even then, [those] tend to be nonce creations or expressions used only within a small circle of acquaintances).

When it turns out that there is, in some sense, a name specifically for this referent, that name is not an ordinary language expression, but a technical term in some domain, and of course it’s not widely known (otherwise, why would people be asking about it?). That means that words like aglet [‘a metal or plastic tube fixed tightly around each end of a shoelace’] are interesting in an abstract sort of way, but not of much use in daily life, outside of discussions of shoelaces, shoes, and the like — and even there, unless you’re talking to people who are experienced in this domain, you’re going to have to explain the word.

But, but, we really can’t say that either an expression is an olfesc or it isn’t; variation is everywhere, and everything is in flux. Would it be preposterous to say that nibling is ca. .63 olfesc and trending upwards? (That’s roughly my current guess: now fairly widely known, but still restricted to scattered speech communities.)

The secrets of neologistic success. The handbook here is Allan Metcalf’s Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004). The publisher’s blurb:

Have you ever aspired to gain linguistic immortality by making up a word? Many people — such famous writers as Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss, along with many lesser-knowns — have coined new words that have endured. But most of the new words people put forward fail to find favor. Why are some new words adopted, while others are ignored? Allan Metcalf explores this question in his fascinating look at new-word creation.

In surveying past coinages and proposed new words, Metcalf discerns lessons for linguistic longevity. He shows us, for instance, why the humorist Gelett Burgess succeeded in contributing the words blurb and bromide to the language but failed to win anyone over to bleesh or diabob. Metcalf examines terms invented to describe political causes and social phenomena (silent majority, Gen-X), terms coined in books (edge city, Catch-22), brand names and words derived from them (aspirin, Ping-Pong), and words that derive from misunderstandings (cherry, kudo). He develops a scale for predicting the success of newly coined words and uses it to foretell which emerging words will outlast the twenty-first century. In this highly original work, Metcalf shows us how to spin syllabic straw into linguistic gold.

Brand names. With trade names / brand names, there’s a first wave of invention and spread (of the product and its name (with the tsunami of Coca-Cola — the soft drink — came the spread of Coca-Cola and Coke — the names — all over the world); and then (with generification and commonification) we get a second wave of onomastic spread (of coke ‘soft drink, esp. a cola’).

Some comments 0n the second development in my 8/10 posting “The commonification of Magic Shell”.

(This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting — coming after two days in which I was almost totally felled by the humid heat we’ve been experiencing (though I did get in a much-needed shower at 2 in the morning yesterday), and barely functioned. All this sadly in utter solitude: not a word with another human being between two exchanges with caregivers, on Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon.)

… with a note on Stanley Kubrick’s directorial techniques.

First, Don Boorleone.

The portmanteau slam. From Tim Pierce on Facebook yesterday, about the Atlanta GA mug shot of defendant P01135809 in the Fani Willis indictment of Helmet Grabpussy and 18 others on RICO — criminal racketeering — charges (the mug shot will appear below, in a display of faces):

— TP: At last, a picture of Don Boorleone that I can truly admire.

— AZ > TP: Is Don Boorleone — a portmanteau of Don Corleone and boor — your own epithet for this person (like my Helmet Grabpussy)? Google finds no cites for it.

— TP > AZ: it’s my invention, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see that someone else thought of it independently. (I also liked it because his name is, well, Don.)

About Don Corleone, from Wikipedia:

(#1) Marlon Brando as Don Corleone (photo: Paramount / Kobal / Shutterstock)

Vito Corleone (born Vito Andolini) is a fictional character in Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather and in the first two of Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy. Vito is originally portrayed by Marlon Brando in the 1972 film The Godfather, and later by Oreste Baldini as a boy and by Robert De Niro as a young man in The Godfather Part II (1974). He is an orphaned Sicilian immigrant who builds a Mafia empire.

… Vito oversees a business founded on gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and union corruption, but he is known as a kind, generous man who lives by a strict moral code of loyalty to friends and, above all, family. He is also known as a traditionalist who demands respect commensurate with his status; even his closest friends refer to him as “Godfather” or “Don Corleone” rather than “Vito”.

The scowl of the Don. This observation from Fabio D’Aleo on Facebook yesterday (passed along to me by Hana Filip):

(#2) Kubrick stares from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE SHINING, and FULL METAL JACKET; plus Don Boorleone’s mug shot scowl

“The Kubrick Stare” is one of director Stanley Kubrick’s most recogizable directorial techniques. A method of shot composition where a character stares at the camera with a forward tilt, to convey to the audience that they are at the peak of their derangement.

The background, from 9/3 in my posting “Manscaping your junk”:

A tv spot ad (only 15 seconds long) for the Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit (Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Trimmer, Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Razor, Gillette Intimate Pubic Shave Cream + Cleanser), released at least twice, under different titles:

(#1) The Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit

— ‘It’s Not Junk, so Treat It Right’  [apparently it’s your “pubic region” instead], published 10/31/22

— “Respect Your Junk!”, published 3/11/23

Two matters of linguistic interest here: the noun manscaping and verb manscape; and the noun junk ‘male genitals’. The material I’ve collected on these is extensive enough that I’m not going to try to cram it all into one posting, but will split things in two, in follow-up postings on the noun junk and on the noun manscaping / the verb manscape.

The first of these I did two days go (on 9/4), in my posting “From the genital junkyard”. Today it’s manscaping day. Just to remind you, my focus is on vocabulary — the noun manscaping and the verb manscape — not on the practices this vocabulary refers to, of trimming, shaving, and removing male pubic hair.

Nevertheless, the practices provide the background, so a few words on them are in order.

Grooming pubic hair. Extensive treatment, including historical and cross-cultural notes, in the Wikipedia article on pubic hair. Among the topics there: a common Western artistic convention for hairless pubes in nudes, both female and male; the growth of pubic shaving and waxing for women; and this note, which I found surprising:

According to one academic study [Gaither et al., “Prevalence and Motivation: Pubic Hair Grooming Among Men in the United States”. American Journal of Men’s Health. 11 (3): 620–640 (May 2017)], as of 2016, approximately 50% of men in the United States practice regular pubic hair grooming [the 50% figure is what I found surprising], which can include trimming [analogous to the trimming of facial hair, and, for many men, chest hair], shaving and removal. The study found that the prevalence of grooming decreases with age. Of males who groom pubic hair, 87% groom the hair above the penis, 66% groom the scrotum and 57% groom the penile shaft.

(One topic not covered in the Wikipedia entry is the shaving of all pubic hair as a practice of some men who identify as effeminates, part of a smooth-body display across the board: no facial hair, no body hair (on torso, shoulders, legs, forearms, back, buttocks), no pubic hair).

The number of devices and products for grooming male pubic hair is astonishing. Here are three snapped in a store by Victor Steinbok, who was my source for the Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit in #1 and its ads:

Two groomers:

(#2) The Plus One groomer

(#3) The Goodline body + ball groomer

And the Gillette razor (one element of the Intimate Manscape Kit in #1):

(#4) The Gillette Intimate pubic hair razor

Which brings us to the annoying ads — and to manscaping vocabulary.

The noun manscaping, the verb manscape. Not (yet) in the OED or most other standard lexicographic sources (like NOAD and AHD5), but it is covered in an entry on Merriam-Webster’s on-line site, which has several notable features. First, its definition

noun manscaping: the trimming or shaving of a man’s body hair so as to enhance his appearance. verb manscape.

gives us a broader ‘male body hair’ sense (to cover the usage in a 2023 cite), rather than the narrower ‘male pubic hair’ sense I’ve been discussing; it appears that the broader sense is the original one. The M-W cites (“recent examples from the web”):

There are also actual health concerns to manscaping yourself, says dermatologist Evan Rieder, MD. — Garrett Munce, Men’s Health, 20 July 2023

Ashton Kutcher needed some manscaping [AZ: of his chest hair] to prepare for his latest role. — Zizi Strater, Peoplemag, 10 Feb. 2023

Use it wet or dry and with or without the adjustable guards for a truly customizable and comfortable manscaping experience. — Garrett Munce, Men’s Health, 28 Sep. 2022

The M-W etymology:

blend [AZ: that is, portmanteau] of man entry 1 and landscaping, gerund of landscape entry 2.

Then, the first known use is given as 2003, but M-W doesn’t give the source, which a bit of digging tells us is the first season of the tv show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where the term seems to have been popularized by the Fab Five in the broader sense, most commonly with the trimming or shaving of unwanted hair in ordinarily visible places: unibrows, nose hair, ear hair, lush chest hair.

The verb appears in various on-line dictionaries (Dictionary.com, Cambridge Dictionary, Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, Farlex Dictionary of Idioms) but without sources. However, from wordsense.eu:

verb manscape: … 2. (neologism) To trim or shave a male’s hair, typically other than the hair atop and behind his head. The term applies most frequently to facial hair, including that of the eyebrows, ears, and nostrils; somewhat frequently to shoulders and back; less frequently to buttocks and pubes; infrequently to arms and legs.

— October 6, 2009, Molly Kissler, How To: Manscape, State Press Magazine:

“”Manscaping, otherwise known as the art of shaving, waxing and cleaning up the superfluous fur on a man…, is a must in this day and age””

— September 30, 2009, Sara DiRienzo, The Art of Manscaping, College News:

“College News presents a working guide of the dos and don’ts of manscaping, taken from suggestions of college students themselves: Dos: …Facial shaving / beard trimming, …Controlling pubic hair, …Embrace leg hair; Donts: Excessive chest hair, Long nose hairs, Ear hair, Adventurous shoulder and back hair, Unibrows, Wild beards… Follow these directions, and you’ll be making sure that the man in your life is properly manscaped.”

— 2007, Jen Lancaster, Bright Lights, Big Ass:

“Is it that hard to manscape? You know, get an electric razor, trim up your shrubbery, blow out your front yard a bit?”

I am, as I have often noted on this blog, a seriously hairy man, an Esau to Jacob’s smoothness. I shave my face, maintaining a small neatly trimmed mustache and a beard patch just large enough to conceal my weak chin (which people are inclined to take as a sign of a weak character and failed masculinity). Otherwise I don’t mess with any of my body hair, certainly not with my pubic hair. (I’m trying to imagine what uncontrolled pubic hair — see DiRenzo above — would be like, wondering what it would mean for pubic hair to run amok). Thing is, I’m happy with my pubic hair as it is; it’s dark brown and springy and smells like me, and it makes a nice nest for my sweet dick. I wash it in warm soapy water every morning, along with my dick and balls, and we all find that pleasant. Why mess with that?

“Original Rockers”: Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro; the published title “AC/BC” is a pun on the name AC/DC (for the rock band), cavemen being from a great many years BCE

(#1) Lead guitar with caveman backup (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The rock band. From Wikipedia:

AC/DC are an Australian rock band formed in Sydney in 1973. It was founded by rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Malcolm Young and lead guitarist Angus Young. The band’s current lineup comprises with founding member and songwriter Angus, rhythm guitarist Stevie Young, bassist Cliff Williams, drummer Phil Rudd, and long-time lead vocalist Brian Johnson. Their music has been variously described as hard rock, blues rock, and heavy metal, but the band calls it simply “rock and roll”. They are cited as a former influence on the new wave of British heavy metal bands, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon.

Don’t know about the two cavemen, but the lead guitarist is clearly drawn to resemble Angus King. From Wikipedia:

(#2) AK in concert

Angus McKinnon Young (born 31 March 1955) is an Australian musician, best known as the co-founder, lead guitarist, songwriter, and only remaining original member of the hard rock band AC/DC. He is known for his energetic performances, schoolboy-uniform stage outfits and his own version of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk.

The Bizarro rock band files. #1 is at least the third Bizarro with a title playing on a rock band’s name. Previously on this blog:

— in my 9/9/20 posting “Red Löbster Cult”:

(#3) A play on Blue Öyster Cult (the rock group)

— in my 2/14/22 posting “Metalico Cat”:

(#4) A complex portmanteau Metalico Cat = Metallico (the rock group) + Calico Cat

(Brief but penis-dense, so not to everyone’s  taste; there are, alas, no images)

My morning name today — a natural for someone as phallically oriented as I am — was pillicock, according to the OED (revised 2006), an archaic BrE word for the penis. A penis word that actually vanished, as a reference to the male organ or any semantic development from that. This despite the fact that it truly contained cock ‘penis’ (the pilli part is etymologically obscure).

(Irrelevantly, my wind went on a dactylic jaunt — pillicock, petticoat, billygoat, jerry-built, marzipan — and from there to a delicious double dactyl, marzipan pillicock. A majestic almond-candy phallus; no doubt someone actually makes these. Or perhaps a sweet-tongued prick, that lying seducer Don Juan in his guise as Captain Marzipan Pillicock.)

I would have expected pillicock to have gone the way of pillock (entirely of obscure etymology), which the OED (revised 2006) tells us started out as

Originally Scottish. The penis. Now English regional (northern) and rare. [1st cite 1568]

But mostly went the way of prick and dick and putz and others in various languages, which went bad, went downhill semantically: pillock has ended up as

Chiefly British colloquial (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot. [1st cite 1967]

(And yes, morning wood word is an odd portmanteau of morning wood and morning word. Leading, I suppose, to thoughts of morning wood word and burn stein, morning burn being a novel alternative to razor burn. Ok, I’ll stop.)

In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, really wizard vases from the Harry Pottery Barn:

A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Harry Pottery = Harry Potter + Pottery: vases in the style of J. K. Rowling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

(plus my play on wizard in really wizard vases. From NOAD:

adj. wizard: British informal, dated wonderful; excellent: how absolutely wizard! | I’ve just had a wizard idea.

A little pun to go along with the extra POP in the Pottery Barn reference.)

As in my previous posting today, “Green grow the pickles, O”:

Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.

This caution applies fully to this POP posting.

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:

(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)

(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)

(Yes, both a Posting Through Pain and a demonstration that I’m Not Dead Yet. Life is trying, but it still goes on.)

Natural kinds and sociocultural categories. I’ll put the heavy stuff right up front:  the cummerbundt is also an (absurd) example of the syncretism of sociocultural categories, combining elements from different existing categories (in this case yielding a Bundt cake cummerbund).

Sociocultural categories — like (among many other things) castes, linguistic communities, cuisines (and specific dishes), musical genres, artistic styles, holiday celebrations, and types of sports and games — vary widely across time and place and context, and are also open to splitting into local variants and to the complicating effects of syncretic combinations, giving us fusion cuisines, fusion musical genres, sports like pickleball concocted out of existing sports, and all the rest.

Sociocultural categories are standardly counterposed to categories “given in nature”– natural kinds — like biological species (and higher-level categories in biological taxonomies). Though these technical classifications present a certain number of issues, they do have a strong component of being grounded in some fashion in nature, a component that’s hard to find in sociocultural categories — however “natural” some of them might seem to us, just because we’re accustomed to them.

The cummerbund. From Wikipedia:

(#2) High Cotton brand midnight blue cummerbund (of silk)

A cummerbund is a broad waist sash, usually pleated, which is often worn with single-breasted dinner jackets (or tuxedos). The cummerbund was adopted by British military officers in colonial India, where they saw it worn by sepoys (Indian soldiers) of the British Indian Army. It was adopted as an alternative to the waistcoat, and later spread to civilian use. The modern use of the cummerbund to Europeans and North Americans is as a component of the traditional black tie Western dress code.
… The form of the cummerbund is a wide band around the waist, and its origin as part of black tie determined the acceptable colours. It was adopted as civilian dress, beginning as a largely summer option with informal dinner jackets, such as Burmese fawn and white, it was restricted to the narrow range of colours which accompany black tie. These were predominantly black, sometimes midnight blue to match the trousers, and occasionally maroon (the normal hue for coloured accessories). The pleats face up because they were originally used to hold ticket stubs and similar items, explaining the slang name ‘crumb-catcher’. … The fastening is a ribbon around the back, tied or held shut by a buckle or velcro.

But cummerbunds are now available in a wide variety of colors and patterns; High Cotton has them in black and burgundy, plus black gingham, and several plaid patterns. Other suppliers run riot.

Customarily, the bow tie and cummerbund match in pattern and color. As here:

(#3) High Cotton burgundy cummerbund and bow tie

Bundt cakes. Previously on this blog, my 1/25/15 posting “savarin”, about a ring-shaped cake made with yeast and soaked in liqueur-flavored syrup. For the 2015 posting, the relevant semantic domain was that of moistened cakes. But today it’s ring-shaped (donut-shaped, or toroidal) cakes. Specifically, Bundt cakes. From Wikipedia:

(#4) A Bundt cake with grapes (photo from Wikipedia)

A Bundt cake is a cake that is baked in a Bundt pan, shaping it into a distinctive donut shape. The shape is inspired by a traditional European cake known as Gugelhupf, but Bundt cakes are not generally associated with any single recipe. The style of mold in North America was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s, after cookware manufacturer Nordic Ware trademarked the name “Bundt” and began producing Bundt pans from cast aluminum. Publicity from Pillsbury saw the cakes gain widespread popularity.
… Bundt cakes do not conform to any single recipe; instead, their characterizing feature is their shape. A Bundt pan generally has fluted or grooved sides, and is usually coated to make releasing the cake easier. Like other tube or ring style pans, the central tube allows faster and more even heat distribution when baking large volumes of batter.

Bundt cakes can then get icings of any sort, can be soaked in liqueur, treated any way standard-issue cakes are. You then have an angel food cake or a baba au rhum or a fruit cake or a carrot cake or a chocolate cake or whatever, but if it’s Bundt it’s ring-shaped and fluted. As in the cummerbundt in #1.

The pursuit of plurals for the English noun octopus — most recently, in yesterday’s posting “Obscure plurals of octopus (and rhinoceros)” — has now lurched into the zone of the dorky, the raunchy, and the portmanteaued with Kyle Wohlmut’s posting today on Facebook of Jon Wilkins’s webcomic Darwin Eats Cake‘s smartass Guide to Pluralizing “Octopus”:

(#1)

The cartoon seems determined to take us to the raunchy portmanteau octopussy (= octopus + pussy) and to Octopussy, the 1983 James Bond spy film, titled from its principal female character, the wicked seductress Octopussy. I’ll be following it there.

But first, a moment with a different direction on #1: Mike Pope responding to Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook, seeing in #1 a solution to the octopus-plural question:

[Gm] octopusen! A winner emerges

The film Octopussy. From Wikipedia:

(#2) A theatrical poster for the film, showing Octopussy (played by Maud Adams) getting 8 hands on James Bond (played by Roger Moore)

Octopussy is a 1983 spy film and the thirteenth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions. It is the sixth to star Roger Moore as the MI6 agent James Bond.

… The film’s title is taken from a short story in Ian Fleming’s 1966 short story collection Octopussy and The Living Daylights, although the film’s plot is mostly original.

… In Octopussy, Bond is assigned the task of following a megalomaniacal Soviet general (Steven Berkoff) who is stealing jewellery and art objects from the Kremlin art repository. This leads Bond to a wealthy exiled Afghan prince, Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), and his associate, Octopussy (Maud Adams), and the discovery of a plot to force disarmament in Western Europe with the use of a nuclear weapon.

A promotional photo for the film shows Maud Adams as Octopussy wearing a long silk robe:

(#3) And giving us a pussy tease (the feminine counterpart of the cock tease) (photo: Danjaq LLC, MGM, United Artists)

On the noun pussy. Basic usage from NOAD, handily covering the pussy of Octopussy:

noun pussy: 1 informal a cat. 2 [a] vulgar slang a woman’s genitals. [b] offensive women in general, considered sexually. 3 North American informal, derogatory a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man).

I note that NOAD labels cock ‘penis’ as vulgar slang, just as it does subentry 2a of pussy.

The taunting use of pussy against men in NOAD‘s subentry 3 is only the beginning of an extension, ultimately, from female to gay male usage. The first step, from GDoS under pussy:

10 a male homosexual; or a man judged to be or teased as being so

And then a usage I have observed, and have taken as my own:

a man’s anus, considered as a sexual organ rather than as an organ of defecation

This is a metaphorical extension of NOAD‘s subentry 2; the usage is incorporated in the well-attested compound nouns man pussy and boy pussy; see my 7/26/13 posting “‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ'”.

Nishi Day, 12/15, the day when I traditionally set off driving west from Columbus OH to Palo Alto CA for the winter quarter; and the day before the December Birthfest (celebrating Ludwig Beethoven, born 1770; Jane Austen, born 1775; and my excellent friend Ned Deily, born 1952)

In today’s Comics Kingdom feed, two strips that turn on formulas, but of two very different kinds. First, a Rhymes With Orange that illustrates a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a joke form that manages to combines two strikingly unrelated elements whose names happen to overlap — in this case a postmortem medical procedure (called an autopsy) and a confused, disordered state (referred to as topsy-turvy). And then, a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, yet another of their forays into the Psychiatrist cartoon meme, set in a psychiatrist’s office and involving a patient on an analytic couch plus a therapist, in an adjacent chair, taking notes on the session; the patient or the therapist or both are astonishing characters, and the setting allows for all manner of jokes to be worked into their encounter — in this case, an everything-bagel patient and a baker therapist, confronting the patient’s anxiety at wanting more (Wayno’s title: “Too Much is Never Enough”).

But now, to the toons!

The Rhymes.

(#1) autopsy + topsy-turvy = autopsy-turvy; the examining table and the surgical instruments, all in disarray

The technical term autopsy plus the vividly playful topsy-turvy, for a nice little clash in tone, in addition to the silly juxtaposition of referents. On topsy-turvy, from NOAD:

adv. topsy-turvy: [a] upside down: the fairground ride turned riders topsy-turvy. [b] in or into a state of confusion: the world has, indeed, gone all topsy-turvy.

adj. topsy-turvy: [a] placed upside down: the bookmark showed a topsy-turvy flag. [b] being in a state of confusion: the topsy-turvy months of the invasion | the topsy-turvy presidential contest.

noun topsy-turvy: [in singular] a state of utter confusion: this economic topsy-turvy has been set in motion by employee ownership of public companies.

ORIGIN early 16th century: apparently based on top ‘highest point’ and obsolete terve ‘overturn’.

The Bizarro.

(#2) Baker therapist examines bagel patient, for whom everything is not enough (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip, not counting the bagel on the couch — see this Page)

On the bagel, from Wikipedia:

(#2) An everything bagel (photo from Wikipedia)

An everything bagel is a type of bagel baked with a mix of toppings. The exact ingredients vary, but recipes often include garlic flakes, onion flakes, poppy seeds, sesame seeds [and caraway seeds] and kosher salt [AZ: that is, allium flakes, tiny seeds, and salt]. The bagels are made with regular dough and the name is independent of additional fillings such as cream cheese.

The everything bagel inspired other bread creations with similar toppings, such as everything bagel chips, everything croissants, everything rolls, everything roti, everything fusilli, and everything hot dog buns. Even mixed nuts have been flavored with the mixture. It is offered by many bakeries and fast casual restaurants. Its origins are disputed, but it was likely first created sometime between 1973 and 1980.

The bagel in #1 is unfulfilled; what it needs is a filling, in particular, cream cheese.

My bagel lies under the onion,
My bagel lies under the seeds.
Oh bring back, ah bring back,
Oh bring back my cream cheese to me.

(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)

Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:

Release Date: Mar 01, 2024

Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier

Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!

[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]

From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):

On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black

Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.

Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.

I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.

— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:

medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)

initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)

final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)

— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:

snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy

similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai

Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.

Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:

pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:

— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object

— extreme heat ‘high temperature’

On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).

Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)

Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:

phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.

And from GDoS:

noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]

One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).

I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.

(Today has been difficult, so this is the best I can do in the way of posting — opening up a topic for further postings, soon to come.)

It starts with this memic shoeshi image I encountered today on Facebook, passed on through various friends and acquaintances, as these things are. A truly wonderful composition:

The memic shoeshi; shoeshi here is a punmanteau: a pun and a portmanteau

From my 11/15/23 posting “The punmanteau”, about cummerbundt in an entertaining Bizarro cartoon:

Yesterday, in my posting “Today’s food punmanteau”, about this composition:

(#1)

The memic shoeshi is a work of art, made (mostly) from food; it is neither edible nor wearable — though it could be deconstructed, and some of its materials eaten.

In other occurrences, shoeshi is in fact food — edible sushi in the shape of a shoe.

In still others, shoeshi is in fact footgear — footwear in the shape of sushi.

And that’s what’s up f6r Epiphany: the three shoeshis — the art (above), the food, and the footwear.

Food shoeshi. Most spectacularly, the creations of Milan restaurateur Yujia Hu, written up in a great many places. Here, from People magazine: “PHOTOS: NBA Sneaker Replicas Made Out of Sushi. No, Really. — Thank you, Yujia Hu, for making this shoe-shi that looks almost too good to eat” by Rose Minutaglio on 5/12/17:

(#2) [People caption:] These fabulous retro Air Jordans with that delicate seaweed Nike swish!

Delicious and fashion-forward.

Italian sushi chef Yujia Hu is the brains behind hilarious and creative “shoe-shi” a blend of sushi and NBA players’ signature sneakers.

From Yeezy kicks to Kyrie Irving footwear to Air Jordans to Damian Lillard Adidas, all of his creations, which he posts on Instagram, are spot-on. Plus, they’re tasty, which is obviously a huge bonus.

Footwear shoeshi. For example, the Coddies® Shoe-shi Slippers ($30). From the company’s website:

(#3) The cuteness of the slippers is exceeded only by the way-over-the-top ad copy (which I reproduce here exactly as it appears on the Coddies site)

Sashimi rollin’, they hatin’…

Moshi moshi! Please welcome to the stage …  Shoe-shi slippers Probably our most ado-raw-ble footwear yet, just one look at they’re cute little smiles will guarantee to maki you feel rice.

Why did the sushi cross the road? Sushi could get to the other side! Go wherever you want in our new Sushi Slippers, which have a soft rubber sole and a squishy footbed with an elasticated back to keep your feet snugger than a well-wrapped California roll.

Shoe-shi slippers’ flexible fit and all-round gorgeousness make them more versatile than a bowl of white rice and they’re the perfect accessory for your next sushi night!

From the “About” page of the makers of Fish Flip Flops:

Coddies is leading the [wacky] footwear revolution, armed with an arsenal of very bad puns and a determination to stand out in a sea of boring, uninspiring footwear, and we hope you’ll join us.

Today’s Bizarro, a Sunday Punnies in which all the puns are incorporated in portmanteaus:

(#1) Three punmanteaus (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page)

Now each of them in detail, in turn. In each case, the pun comes in the material shared by the two contributors to the portmanteau — material that is understood one way as part of the first contributor and a different way as part of the second. And then the cartoon combines the two understandings in a single drawing: a (spiritually) aware werwolf (lupine zazen); ill-tempered tempered glass (oh shut up, Silica Boy!); and a matador doorman (the hand that stabs, the hand that opens).

awarewolf = (spiritully) aware ‘in a state of being conscious and connected to your inner self, as well as to a higher power or divine energy’ (from the Yoga Basics website) + werewolf  ‘(in myth or fiction) a person who changes for periods of time into a wolf, typically when there is a full moon’ (NOAD); shared /wer/, understood as the ware element of aware, beware, and wary, conveying alertness or guardedness; or as the ‘man’ element wer in werwolf (literally ‘man-wolf’)

(#2) A yoga meditation position for achieving spiritual awareness (from the Yoga Basics site)

(#3) A werewolf by the light of the moon (from the Monster Fandom wiki)

ill-tempered glass = ill-tempered ‘having a bad temper or disposition’ + tempered glass ‘a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass’ (Wikipedia); shared /tɛmpǝrd/, understood as referring to emotional disposition in ill-tempered; or as ‘(of glass) treated to increase strength’

matadorman = matador ‘bullfighter’ + doorman ‘a man such as a porter, bouncer, or janitor who is on duty at the entrance to a large building’ (NOAD); shared /dɔr/. understood as an agent suffix –dor in matador; or as door ‘entrance to a building’ in doorman

(#4) A matador in action (from my 8/1/19 posting “Understanding the bull”)

(#5) A famous doorman, William May (from the Food Gal site)

The Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:

(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying  — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret

(Hat tip to Ellen Kaisse, for alerting me to this Coverly.)

Background: the classic Beware of Dog sign, on a boundary of enclosed premisses:

(#2) Designed to warn off malicious intruders and to warn innocent visitors that they have to seek assistance to enter

Background: previously in Speed Bump. In my 10/20/15 posting “Going to the dogs”:

(#3) A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but one that works only in pronunciation (not in print): avant-garde + guard dog, referring to what is in this case an avant-garde guard dog

Background: emotional-support animals. Previously on this blog:

— in my 10/19/14 posting “Animals on duty”, on a Patricia Marx piece in the New Yorker about emotional-support animals:

Contrary to what many business managers think, having an emotional-support card merely means that one’s pet is registered in a database of animals whose owners have paid anywhere from seventy to two hundred dollars to one of several organizations, none of which are recognized by the government. (You could register a Beanie Baby, as long as you send a check.)

— in my 5/5/15 posting “Service animals”, on a Bizarro cartoon with an emotional-support bear:

(#4)

an emotional-support card for your pet doesn’t allow you to take it into a restaurant, hotel, store, taxi, or train, while service dogs can go all these places.

Meanwhile, if you let them, Coverly’s emotional-support dogs would follow you anywhere, all on their own hook.

If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.

In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.

This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.

While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).

Rachel Dratch. First came a re-play of a 2015 episode “Gut Check” of the police drama Unforgettable, centered on an apparently scatter-brained, flaky character Rosie Webb (who turns out to be genuinely goofy, but a good deal cannier than the investigators had supposed). I had that nagging feeling of familiarity, but let it pass.

Then much more recently (first appearing on 4/1, according to iSpot.tv), American Home Shield’s 30-second tv commercial, “Don’t Worry, Warran-Chi”, in which the actor plays an off-the-wall psychic, shown here with a characteristic expression on her face:

(#1) She detects a grocery shopper’s warran-chi, an aura indicating that he possesses the chi (life energy) that comes with an excellent home warranty (warran-chi is a punmanteau, a pun based on a portmanteau, as in my 11/1/23 posting “The punmanteau”)

From Wikipedia, where I discovered that she looked familiar because I remembered her from Saturday Night Live sketches:

Rachel Susan Dratch (born February 22, 1966) is an American actress and comedian. After she graduated from Dartmouth College, she moved to Chicago to study improvisational theatre at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. Dratch’s breakthrough role was her tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1999 to 2006. During her time on SNL, she portrayed a variety of roles including Debbie Downer. She has since occasionally returned to SNL as a guest portraying Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Billy Burke. Recently, this character actor made back-to-back appearances on my tv screen: from 1-2 pm (PT), as truly creepy serial killer Philip Stroh in Major Crimes (on Lifetime); from 2-3 pm, as earnest FBI agent Gabriel Dean (cautiously beginning a sweet connection to the character Jane Rizzoli) in Rizzoli & Isles (on Start TV). A disorienting change of gears — hard to get the monster Stroh out of my head.

In both roles, Burke (handsome but interestingly craggy-faced, a good thing in a male actor) projects somewhat unkempt and carefully guarded, even wary, masculinity, giving off a whiff of testosterone, but taking this character in different directions for the two roles. This seems to be his default presentation, as in this p.r. head shot from TMDB:

(#2) As Gabriel Dean, he smiles, but cautiously, and not for photos

Then, as Philip Stroh:

(#3) Shaven, scruffy, bearded

But he’s a versatile actor, who’s undertaken a wide range of parts, portraying many different characters (some of whom are easy-going and full of open smiles); it’s not all #2, much less #3. From Wikipedia:

William Albert Burke (born November 25, 1966) [stage name Billy Burke] is an American actor and songwriter [and performer]. [He] is known for his role as Charlie Swan in [the fantasy film] Twilight and its [four] sequels [2008-12]. In 2011, he played Cesaire in Red Riding Hood. In 2012, he was cast as one of the lead characters, Miles Matheson, in the NBC science-fiction series Revolution. From 2015 to 2017, he starred in the CBS series Zoo. He has also appeared in the supernatural horror film Lights Out (2016) and the thriller Breaking In (2018). [and tons of other stuff; long list in Wikipedia]

(It’s sheer accident that Dratch and Burke were both born in 1966.)

… Wayno’s title for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which I think of “MobyDicPOP”, to recognize the phrasal overlap portmanteau Moby Dictionary in it:

Moby Dick + dictionary (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

Easy to imagine other DicPOPs: Tricky Dictionary, for Richard Nixon’s pungent vocabulary of contempt and abuse; Private Dictionary, for the lexicon of private eyes; Pencil Dictionary, for a list of famous men with thin penises; and so on.

I suppose it’s merely caviling to note that a Moby Dictionary should be huge, and white.

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.

(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

More Juanderful food. On to burritos, and the Juanderful Burrito restaurant in League City TX:

(#2) The logo, just the name and the sombrero; the place has a website, here

On burritos, see the section in my 8/9/16 posting “Advances in the fast food world”.

Back to tacos (and more). Another playful name, for the Bay Area taco restaurants Cholita Linda, in Oakland, Alameda, Walnut Creek, and San Francisco (website here). From the website, an explanation for the name, from Vanessa Chavez, who founded the restaurants with her husband Murat Sozeri:

For as long as I can remember, my Peruvian born mother was called Chola or Cholita. In Peru, it’s a term of endearment that means a girl of native or mixed heritage and “Linda” means pretty or sweet. It’s sweet, warm and, full of love, which is the perfect representation of the food we cook.

The food. The Cholita Linda menu goes beyond tacos to sandwiches, salads, and platters of chicken, fish, and picadillo; the restaurants are known especially for their fish tacos:

(#3) The famous fish tacos (photo by Alix Wall on the restaurant’s site)

The song. Now, cholita is monstrously complex (hang on for a moment, especially if you know anything about cholos), but chola and its diminutive variant cholita are indeed terms of endearment in many Latino communities. What VC fails to mention — probably because she took it for granted as something everybody would know — is that Cholita Linda is a cute play on words, an allusion to the song “Cielito Lindo”.

From my 10/4/22 posting “All about /aj/: the trisyllables”,  in a section on the song “Cielito Lindo” (roughly ‘Lovely Sweet One’): it’s a popular Mexican song (extolling the beauty of a young woman), commonly played by mariachi bands, which has become a kind of popular anthem of Mexico (often played, for example, at international sporting events). Pretty much everybody does know it. Even me: I learned it in school as a child, in both Spanish and English.

[A digression on the Spanish expression cielito lindo, which is, necessarily, of the masculine grammatical gender: cielo ‘sky’ is masculine in grammatical gender, so its diminutive cielito (usable as an endearment) is also, and so is any adjective modifying it, like the adjective with the stem lind– ‘lovely, cute’ (‘lovely’ when applied to a woman), so cielito lindo. These facts about grammatical gender are independent of the sex of the referent of the noun cielito — which can be female, as in the song; or male, in which case cielito lindo will be translated as ‘cute boy’.]

The noun stem chol–. From Wikipedia:

A cholo or chola [male or female, respectively] is a member of a Chicano and Latino subculture or lifestyle associated with a particular set of dress, behavior, and worldview which originated in Los Angeles. … Cholo was first reclaimed by Chicano youth in the 1960s and emerged as a popular identification in the late 1970s. The subculture has historical roots in the Pachuco subculture, but today is largely equated with anti-social behavior, criminal behavior and gang activity.

The intricate and shifting history of cholo is sketched in the Wikipedia article. The term was used to label mixed-race, or mulatto, people, so used as a term of contempt. But mixed-race people are also often seen as especially good-looking, so that terms for them can pick up positive uses, in particular as endearments — as with cholo / cholito / chola / cholita (see Vanessa Chavez above).

One more playfully named taco restaurant. Tacolicious, the San Francisco and Palo Alto taco restaurants; but this time I’ve already posted about it — in my 5/6/13 posting “Tacolicious”, about the restaurants, their food, and coinages in –licious.

… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:

(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

The POP’s two contributors. First, from NOAD:

noun laissez-faire: [a] [usually as modifier] a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering: a laissez-faire attitude to life. [b] Economics abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market: [as modifier]: laissez-faire capitalism.  ORIGIN French, literally ‘allow to do’.

Then, fairy godmother in Wikipedia:

In fairy tales, a fairy godmother (French: fée marraine) is a fairy with magical powers who acts as a mentor or parent to someone, in the role that an actual godparent was expected to play in many societies. In Perrault’s Cinderella, he concludes the tale with the moral that no personal advantages will suffice without proper connections.

And at the opera:

(#2) Poster for Jules Massenet’s opera Cendrillon (based on Perrault’s Cinderella) showing the titular character’s fairy godmother. (Wikipedia illustration)

Then, about Cinderella in Wikipedia:

“Cinderella”, or “The Little Glass Slipper”, is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage.

… the version that is now most widely known in the English-speaking world was published in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697 as Cendrillon and was anglicized as Cinderella.

A French fairy POP. Inspired by the English Bizarro POP, I constructed a fairy POP in French, but it’s not nearly as clever as the Bizarro one:

Le baiser de la fée marraine ‘the fairy godmother’s kiss’ = Le baiser de la fée ‘The Fairy’s Kiss‘ + fée marraine ‘fairy godmother’

(Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) is a neoclassical ballet in one act and four scenes composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1928 and revised in 1950 for George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. (Wikipedia))

The overlap is the word fée ‘fairy’ (in both contributing phrases). The Bizarro POP is impressive because it involves a pun: the overlap /fer/ represents the word faire in the first contributor, but the first syllable of the word fairy in the second.

You can get something of the effect of the Bizarro pun POP by using a woman’s name with Fay or Faye as FN: Le baiser de la Fay Wray / Faye Dunaway. Picture a neoclassic ballet in which Fay Wray kisses King Kong, or Faye Dunaway as Bonnie kisses Warren Beatty as Clyde.