Quantcast
Channel: Portmanteaus – Arnold Zwicky's Blog
Viewing all 311 articles
Browse latest View live

News on the edible penis front

$
0
0

Following on yesterday’s edible-penguin posting (focused mostly on cookies and chocolates), I return today to phallic foodstuffs, a topic last discussed here in connection with penis-shaped breadstuffs: baguettes, brioches, and tartes. Now to cookies and chocolates, with the nice portmanteau find cockie ‘cock cookie’, plus some other deliberately phallic food.

The find of cockie was on this site, which has a recipe for making the cookies (but not very good photos). There are probably more hits out there, but various factors interfere with searches, most notably cockie as a frequent misspelling of cookie. But there’s also cocky (with the variant cockie), Australian slang for ‘cockatoo’; cocky (with the variant cockie), Australian slang for a type of small-scale farmer; and cock-a-leekie soup (with the variant cockie leekie), a Scottish soup dish of leeks and chicken stock.

But there are plenty of other penis cookies out there. Here are two varieties, an easy home recipe and a fancier (and more realistic) item:

  (#1)

  (#2)

There are penis cookie cutters out there of several sorts, for cookies like #1 and for cookies with a side view, as in this set from Bachlorette:

  (#3)

A joke eCard about penis cookies:

  (#4)

Then to chocolates. Again, an enormous variety, from the relatively simple (and realistic):

  (#5)

to the imaginatively artistic:

  (#6)

8″ Of Chocolate

The first product from new erotic brand United Indecent Pleasures is an eight-inch chocolate penis that oozes fondant cream.

The filling comes in six fruit and liqueur flavours, and there’s a firmer chocolate fondant in the base. (link)

(Chocock would be a plausible portmanteau for ‘chocolate cock’, but it doesn’t seem to be attested.)

Somewhat further afield to chocolate penis peanut brittle, which it’s hard not to think of as penis brittle:

  (#7)

With penguins, I moved on from sweet things to crackers. Though there are plenty of penguin-shaped crackers for sale, I haven’t found any penis-shaped ones. Instead, for penis crackers we find crackers with outlines of penises on them, like these Triscuits and Easy Cheese numbers:

  (#8)

On Easy Cheese, from Wikipedia:

Easy Cheese is the trademark for a processed cheese product distributed by Mondelēz International, also referred to as aerosol cheese, spray cheese or simply Cheese in a Can, and is a descendant of squeeze cheese (a semi-solid cheesefood from the 1970s packaged in a squeezable plastic tube). It comes packaged in a pressurized can, much like canned whipped cream and does not require refrigeration. Easy Cheese has its own entry in [Jane and Michael Stern’sEncyclopedia of Bad Taste. It was originally marketed from 1965-84 as Nabisco Snack Mate.

Going further afield from penis crackers, we get to penis pasta:

  (#9)

and to the entertaining sushi penis:

  (#10)

Many ways in which you can actually eat a metaphorical penis (as opposed to metaphorically eating an actual penis, in fellatio).

Two Bonuses. Searching for images of food in the shape of a penis pulled up several non-food examples of phallicity, among them these astonishingly realistic penis bottle openers:

  (#11)

and this suggestive cologne bottle in a 1979 Pierre Cardin ad:

  (#12)

The items in #11 are jokes, like the penis-shaped food. But #12 is intended to convey a sense of intense masculinity for the product, as if wearing this cologne will make you more of a man.

 



Departments: Amazing food

$
0
0

Two finds: the pizza smoothie, discovered in today’s Zits

  (#1)

– and cockolate (yes, more chocolate penises), especially in the form of Cockolate Pops.

The pizza smoothie turns up in other playful contexts, most notably in a public service ad from the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (whose theme is “Take Time to Be a Dad Today”). Some expanatory text:

This guy knows his son can’t eat pizza because he has braces. So, he turns that slice of greasy pizza into the world’s unhealthiest smoothie [which the kid, of course, adores]. The ad was created by the federal Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative.

It’s morning in America! Pizza smoothies for everyone.

Gentle humor with a message.

Then there’s a project from Derek Schooley Design, which has the pizza smoothie concept and a design for a bottle, but not yet (apparently) an actual product. The text from DSD and the bottles:

Although quite the stretch of the imagination, I dream of a world where pizza and milkshake can work together. This was the inspiration for designing a brand new beverage line about heatable pizza shakes. The fun and intriguing bottle shape combined with the unique visuals of a pizza and a blender help draw attention to the packaging. The rest of the magic comes from the reactions one might expect when considering drinking down one of these babies.

  (#2)

On to cockolate. Yesterday, in my posting on edible penises, I noted the portmanteau cockie ‘cock cookie’ and remarked that I hadn’t found any cites with chocock ‘chocolate cock’. Then last night I realized I hadn’t looked for the other way of combining cock and chocolate, namely cockolate — and then I found a gold mine. Lots more chocolate penises (and, incidentally, lots more chocolate cock referring to the penis of a black or brown man), but especially this entertaining commercial product:

  (#3)

Cockolate Pops was erected in 2010. We specialize in Erotic Chocolate Lollipops (cock and pussy pops). Cockolate Pops make a brilliant bachelorette party gift idea.  Great for passion parties as well. Our Gourmet Cockolate Pops Lollipops have a wonderful taste, made of some of the finest stuff around, and they are available in 8 different delicious flavors. Remember, We’re Not Just Dicks!

And an injunction to consume the product:

  (#4)

And that’s the amazing food news for today.


Portmanteau news

$
0
0

Three portmanteau finds in recent days: cronut, vog, and Prancercise.

1. cronut. Now the craze in New York City. From “ ’Cronut’ Fever Taking New York (And The Country) By Storm” in the Huffington Post (with extensive links to relevant sites, and a video):

We hope you’ve heard of the cronut by now. This donut-croissant hybrid, created by pastry chef Dominique Ansel of Dominique Ansel Bakery, is already trademarked, despite being around for less than a month. There’s a fan page for fellow cronut-lovers and cronut scalping has begun. To put it simply, people are obsessed with this creation.

For folks hoping to sample the pastry, they have to wait in line at the bakery. And they better get there early — cronuts sell out FAST. And apparently these pastries aren’t overhyped — reports from the food world are overwhelmingly positive.

In a picture:

  (#1)

The pronunciation of cronut seems to be straightforward: /kronət/, with primary accent on the first syllable and secondary accent on the second — so, just like crownut. I find this rather ugly, but there it is. And croissant is pretty much swallowed up in it, with only /kr/ surviving the combination with doughnut.

[Digression: the pronunciation of croissant in English. Here there is an enormous amount of variation, with English speakers going all the way from shifting into a full French pronunciation of the word and on through a variety of nativizations. All variants have an initial [k], an [s] at the beginning of the second syllable, and primary accent on the second syllable, but everything else is variable.

NOAD2′s pronunciation

k(r)wäˈsänt, -ˈsäN

abbreviates four variants, on two dimensions: the initial consonantal onset ([krw] as in French, or nativized to [kw] — but nativization to [kr] can also be heard) and the treatment of the final offset ([nt], from the spelling, or zero, with the preceding vowel nasalized — but [n] can also be heard). NOAD gives [a] as the vowel in both syllables, as in French, but other vowels can be heard: for the first vowel, [æ] or [ə]; for the second, [æ] or [ɔ]. The variants that are most distant from French are then probably

[krəˈsænt] or [kwəˈsænt]

For cronut, only [kr] survives; I haven’t heard anyone use [krw] or [kw]. Nor have I heard the word accented on the second syllable.]

[Digression: the macaron. Larry Horn noted on ADS-L yesterday the similar pastry the macaron, also very popular in New York City (and elsewhere). Cousin of the cronut. From Wikipedia:

A macaron [not to be confused with the macaroon] … is a sweet meringue-based confection made with eggs, icing sugar, granulated sugar, almond powder or ground almond, and food colouring. It is also called Luxemburgerli. The macaron is commonly filled with ganache, buttercream or jam filling sandwiched between two cookies. The name is derived from the Italian word macarone, maccarone or maccherone, the Italian meringue.

History: Although predominantly a French confection, there has been much debate about origins. Larousse Gastronomique cites the macaron as being created in 1791 in a convent near Cormery. Some have traced its French debut back to the arrival of Catherine de’ Medici’s Italian pastry chefs whom she brought with her in 1533 upon marrying Henry II of France.

In the 1830s, macarons were served two-by-two with the addition of jams, liqueurs, and spices. The macaron as it is known today, composed of two almond meringue discs filled with a layer of buttercream, jam, or ganache filling, was originally called the “Gerbet” or the “Paris macaron.” Pierre Desfontaines of the French pâtisserie Ladurée has sometimes been credited with its creation in the early part of the 20th century, but another baker, Claude Gerbet, also claims to have invented it.

  (#2)

2. vog. This one came up on Facebook yesterday, in a posting by Susan Fischer. From Wikipedia:

Vog is a form of air pollution that results when sulfur dioxide and other gases and particles emitted by an erupting volcano react with oxygen and moisture in the presence of sunlight. The word is a portmanteau of the words “volcanic”,”smog”, and “fog”. The term is in common use in the Hawaiian islands, where the Kīlauea volcano, on Hawaiʻi Island (aka “The Big Island”), has been erupting continuously since 1983. Based on June 2008 measurements, Kīlauea emits 2,000 – 4,000 tons of sulfur dioxide every day.

An ugly word for an ugly phenomenon.

3. Prancercise. This I stumbled on in the Huffington Post while searching for material on cronuts: “Prancercise: Joanna Rohrback’s Fitness Program Inspired By Horses”:

Joanna Rohrback invented Prancercise – “A springy, rhythmic way of moving forward, similar to a horse’s gait” – back in 1989, but it never caught on. Perhaps it’s because she was so ahead of her time that she created an exercise video you couldn’t follow unless you had some sort of portable video playback device. Such is the price of being a visionary

Fortunately, the world has finally caught up with Rohrback and we can all “stop talkin’ and do some walkin’.”.

(There’s a video.)

Prancercise (prance + exercise) obviously echoes dancercise. From NOAD2:

dancercise (also dancercize)  noun  a system of aerobic exercise using dance movements. ORIGIN 1960s: blend of dance and exercise.

In the same vein, also from NOAD2:

Jazzercise  noun trademark  a type of fitness training combining aerobic exercise and dancing to jazz music. ORIGIN 1970s: blend of jazz and exercise.

So many possibilities for dances (some of which might have been proposed), for example:

calypsocise / calypsercise, cloggercise, flamencocise / flamencercise, hulacise / hulercise, macarenacise / macarenercise limbocise / limbercise, polkacise / polkercise, rumbacise / rumbercise, salsacise / salsercise, sambacise / sambercise, swingercise, waltzercise

And some for types of music (like Jazzercise), for example:

bluesercise, punkercise, rappercise, reggaecise, rockercise

And more unlikely, on the phonological models of dancercise and prancercise:

financercise, glancercise, lancercise, romancercise, trancercise

 


Dilbertmanteau

$
0
0

Today’s Dilbert:

Not just an entreprenidiot (entrepreneur + idiot), but a serial entreprenidiot, someone with one dumb business idea after another.

 


The metastrip

$
0
0

Today’s Doonesbury is a metastrip, a cartoon about cartoons:

 

On the number of characters in Doonesbury:

Doonesbury has a large group of recurring characters, with 24 currently listed at the strip’s website. There, it notes that “readers new to Doonesbury sometimes experience a temporary bout of character shock,” as the sheer number of characters—and the historical connections among them—can be overwhelming. (link)

The main characters in this strip are two of the original cast: the ex-hippie Zonker Harris and the title character, Mike Doonesbury.

On the strip’s portmanteau name:

The name “Doonesbury” is a combination of the word doone (prep school slang for someone who is clueless, inattentive, or careless [not in the OED or slang dictionaries]) and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau’s roommate at Yale University. (link)


funyak

$
0
0

In the June/July issue of Instinct magazine (aimed at young gay men), a travel story by Jonathan Higbee, “Risen From the Ashes: The gay scene spread across the volcanic lands of New Zealand rises from the brink of extinction”, about a Kiwi vacation with his partner. On p. 46, Higbee writes that the couple

walked a few blocks to the town center [of Queenstown] to be picked up for our first Queenstown adventure, “funyaking” down the Dart River.

Not merely kayaking, Dart River Safaris’ funyaks have earned the right to update the nme of the age-old river activity.

A photo from Dart River Safaris:

Funyaks come in many styles, and you can rent or buy them in many places around the world. From the CrabApple Whitewater company, which offers funyaks (inflatable river kayaks) for whitewater rafting in Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont:

What is a Funyak?

The word “funyak” has come to mean several things through marketing and whitewater product development. Some consider a funyak to be a molded plastic boat made for lakes and ponds – fun “touring” kayak, essentially. However, most consider a “Funyak” to be an inflatable whitewater craft, appearing and functioning similar to a white water river kayak – a “fun” kayak. They are built for fun and stability for whitewater trips.

Funyaks are stable whitewater craft designed to bring the possibility of river kayaking to novice paddlers. Individuals can buy an inexpensive Funyak to use on lakes or on mild whitewater. They are easily transported and easy to maneuver through mild rapids. They do not require a skirt over a closed cockpit which seals in the paddler. The cockpit in a Funyak is open so the Eskimo roll is not necessary to right the boat while still in it. The open cockpit Funyak is stable and rarely turns over in mild rapids and is easily righted if it capsizes. A further advantage of Funyaks is the soft material – rather than a hard plastic shell as on a “Sit-On-Top” plastic kayak, the soft material is comfortable and allows you to stretch out and recline between rapids or paddling sections. There is also room in the cockpit to carry items for a short whitewater excursion – food, drink, extra gear, squirt guns, etc.

Portmanteaus take to the water.

 


Foodmanteaus

$
0
0

In his Boston Globe blog on the 8th, Ben Zimmer tackles the cronut (which I too have posted about) — croissant + doughnut — and food portmanteaus more generally:

Why we love ‘cronuts’: The devilish pull of the food portmanteau

Food portmanteaus … are popping up faster than you can say “tofurkey.” On his website, Barry Popik, an expert on the origins of food terms, has culled a bumper crop of new blends. For instance, Jess Kapadia of the Food Republic blog recently shared her recipe for the sandwich fixing “tomatonaise,” which consists of “super-ripe tomatoes food-processed, or immersion-blended, with mayo.” Meanwhile, Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Chef,” introduced Huffington Post readers to the “eggocado,” a baked egg inside an avocado.

Further examples, old and new, follow.

Foodmanteaus come up on this blog every so often. Here’s a sampling, in reverse chronological order, going back a year and a half:

5/25/13   cockolate (chocolate penises) (link)

5/24/13   cockie ‘cock cookie’ (link)

5/21/13   despairagus (link)

5/16/13   Manwich (and other –wich food names), BeefaroniRice-A-Roni (and other –aroni food names) (link)

5/6/13  Tacolicious (link)

3/7/13   jalapiñot noir (link)

12/1/12  teasan (link)

10/4/12   craisins (link)


-licious sex

$
0
0

It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back cover (a montage of twinks in heat) can be viewed in the posting “Twinkalicious porn” on AZBlogX (where such images are allowed). The word twinkalicious has two parts, the twink part (with a piece of sexuality slang) and the -licious part (related in some way to delicious). I’ll comment on both parts. But first, some other combinations of these two parts.

More -licious sex. Next up: a series of three Twink-A-Licious porn flicks, the front covers of which are (just barely) WordPressable:

   (#1)

Summary of the action in this flick (courtesy of the blogger 8TeenBoy) on the TLA Video site, here.

  (#2)

  (#3)

My “Twinkalicious porn” posting has the back cover of the first of these (#3 there), an extremely crowded montage of twink sex.

Then came two bloggers, one using the name Twinkilicious, the other the name Twinkielicious.

Finally, there’s a Twinkylicious porn site; the image from the home page on the Twinkylicious.com site (which offers huge numbers of films of twinkies having sex, plus still photos of hot twinkies) is #4 in my “Twinkalicious porn” posting. And there’s also a Twinkylicious Bareback porn site.

So there is variation in the way twink / twinkie / twinky gets combined with -(V)licioustwinkalicioustwink-a-licious, twinkilicious, twinkielicioustwinkylicious. Compare these to my treatment of scruffalicious and scruffilicious.

On twink and twinkie. (Twinky is sometimes found as a variant of the usual twinkie.) Discussion of these items (and on the Hostess snack food) in a posting of mine on male photographer Howard Roffman, who specializes in twinks. Here’s an Urban Dictionary entry (by M. Alan Wood 2/17/08) on twinkalicious that makes a stab at defining twink:

Formed by a combination of the words twink and delicious. It is used as an adjective to describe a very attractive young white male. Twinks tend to be under 25 years old, slim, no body hair, stylish hair and clothing, enjoy clubbing, effeminate and somewhat arrogant. They are also considered to be the ultimate prize for many older gay males, a trophy boyfriend.

Twinkalicious can also be used to describe a situation or setting.

Have you been to the new club downtown? I heard it is twinkalicious. Packed wall to wall with hotties.

This entry has several of the problems that afflict UD entries (some discussion here). It describes a stereotype of the twink, injects the writer’s opinions and attitudes, and adds side information that’s not really relevant to the definition.

For the record: twinks are by no means all white — there are Asian and Asian American twinks of several ethnicities, and some black ones as well — and many are in no way effeminate, or arrogant, for that matter. What they do have is youthful male beauty, embodying the ideal of Apollo rather than Priapus. There are muscle twinks and preppy twinks and even leather twinks. Light body hair doesn’t disqualify a young man from twinkhood, but there are limits. Serious facial scruff moves you towards Priapus territory, but a small beard, for instance a goatee, is fine (indeed, the cocksucking twink on the front cover of the Twinkalicious DVD — #1 in “Twinkalicious porn” — has a modest goatee).

As with all social categories, the central members of the TWINK category are easy to discern, but the boundaries of the category are fuzzy, and many men will clearly belong neither to TWINK nor to one of its alternatives, like BEAR.

On -licious. From a 2009 posting of mine on “Liciousness”:

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading “the tastiest suffix”) an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

In my 2006 posting, I wrote that:

there are cites of babelicious and blackalicious from 1992, which seems to have been a particularly morpholicious year.  The larger point is that -Vlicious words are likely to have been invented independently on many occasions, as portmanteaus, leading eventually to the emergence of the jocular suffix.  Some innovations in language have no clear single moment of creation, but arise as natural re-workings of the material of a language, by many different hands.

That is, -(V)licious is moving into libfix territory. In a 2011 posting on “Pornmanteaus”, I noted the  following items with “libfixes or incipient libfixes” attached to the base porn (relevant ones for this posting boldfaced):

pornacious, pornastrophe / porntastrophe, pornerrific, porneteria / pornoteria, pornilicous / pornalicious, pornmageddon / pornageddon, pornocaplypse / pornpocalypse, pornorarama, pornoscopic, pornotopic, pornovision, pornplex / pornoplex, porntastic, pornucopia, pornvalanche / pornalanche, pornzilla

For most of these, the semantic contribution of the combining element has been bleached to some degree, a point I expanded on in a 2012 posting on portmanteaus:

The appearance of dicktionary in [a] product description reminded me of another family of portmanteau words: cocktacular, cocktastic, cockalicious; dicktacular, dicktastic, dickalicious (cock / dick + spectacular / fantastic / delicious). All are in the Urban Dictionary. Some of them have uses related to sex, but mostly they seem to be generically positive adjectives (with cock or dick in there purely as attention-getters).

I’m inclined to see the various -(V)licious words based on twink(ie) in the same light: the final formative contributes merely (strong) positive affect, rather than attributing sensory deliciousness. Some -(V)licious words do look more like portmanteaus; from my 2012 posting:

Then there’s Dickalicious, an “edible penis arousal gel”, available in four flavors: banana, strawberry, raspberry, pina colada. [The gel provides you with a delicious dick.]

But most seem to have a generically positive libfix. In particular, a twinkalicious young man is a hot twink, not necessarily literally delicious. And a twinkalicious club is one that’s well supplied with such men.

 



Penguin cartoons

$
0
0

Today’s cartoon crop includes a Tundra strip (passed on by Chris Waigl) with a penguin as the central character (and a pun and an implicature) and a penguinless one (today’s Pearls Before Swine) that’s about characters from one strip appearing in another — but then leads to another cartoon penguin (and portmanteau animals and a hand signal):

  (#1)

  (#2)

Strip #1. By asserting a generalization about common knowledge — everyone knows (that) penguins can’t fly — the penguin implicates that it can’t fly (and therefore must drive).

Folded in there is a play on two senses of intransitive fly. From NOAD2:

(of a bird or other winged creature) move through the air under control: close the door or the moths will fly in | the bird can fly enormous distances.

• (of an aircraft or its occupants) travel through the air: I fly back to New York this evening.

Now, on Tundra:

Tundra is a comic strip written and drawn by Wasilla, Alaska, cartoonist Chad Carpenter. The comic usually deals with wildlife, nature and outdoor life. Tundra began in December 1991 in the Anchorage Daily News and is currently self-syndicated to over 500 newspapers.

Tundra is primarily drawn in two styles, single-panel gag comics using puns in combination with wildlife and the outdoors, and a three-panel strip that employs regular characters: Sherman the Squirrel, Dudley the Bear, Chad the Cartoonist, Andy Lemming, Whiff Skunk, and Hobart the Wise [a monk]. (link)

(It’s significant that Chris Waigl lives in Alaska and so sees this strip regularly.)

Strip #2. Pearls Before Swine has been indulging in metastrips recently (as I noted here). In this one, not only does the cartoonist (Stefan Pastis) appear as a character in his own strip — as Bill Griffith regularly does in Zippy the Pinhead  (and Chad Carpenter does in Tundra) — but a character (Steve Dallas) from a different strip appears as well (something Griffith also does every so often in Zippy):

Steve Dallas is a fictional character in the American comic strips of Berke Breathed, most famously Bloom County in the 1980s.

He was first introduced as an obnoxious frat boy in the college strip The Academia Waltz, which ran in the University of Texas’s Daily Texan during 1978 and 1979. Steve then reappears in Bloom County after graduation as a self-employed, unscrupulous lawyer.

He was the first character to have been featured in all four of Breathed’s comic strips. He appeared regularly, albeit much older, in the Sunday-only Opus. (Wikipedia link)

Two views of Steve:

  (#3)

  (#4)

I’ll get to some details of #4 in a little while. Right now, what’s most important is that Steve Dallas leads us to that most famous of cartoon penguins, Opus:

Opus the Penguin (Opus T. Penguin) is a character in the comic strips and children’s books of Berkeley Breathed, most notably the popular 1980s strip Bloom County. Breathed has described him as an “existentialist penguin” and the favorite of his many characters. Until November 2, 2008 he ran in the comic strip Opus.

… Opus’ appearance changed since his inception – he originally looked like a common penguin, but between 1982 and 1986 his nose grew dramatically (developing its signature bump in the middle, of which Opus is very self-conscious). Mike Binkley, during one Sunday strip, points out the fact that Opus more closely resembles a puffin, a revelation which shocks Opus. (In the final panel of the same strip, Opus responds by telling Binkley that he looks like a carrot.) Opus says he is attracted to “svelte buoyant waterfowl”.

… Over the years Opus has served as Steve Dallas’ legal secretary, journeyed to Antarctica in search of his mother, played the tuba in heavy metal group Deathtöngue (later renamed Billy and the Boingers), wooed (and was briefly married to) an abstract sculptor named Lola Granola, worked as a newspaper personals editor, lifestyle columnist and comic strip writer, had brief, experimental stints employed as a farmer, garbageman and even a cartoonist (or, as he called it, a stripper, which he would also be at one point), and run for vice president on the National Radical Meadow Party ticket, along with his running mate Bill the Cat. (Wikipedia link)

In this early strip (about misperceptions of speech), Opus’s nose/beak is still fairly realistic:

  (#5)

(Note the Wikipedia reference to the heavy metal group Deathtöngue, whose name appears, without the umlaut, on Steve Dallas’s shirt in #4.)

Digression on portmanteau animals. While we’re in Bloom County, here’s a Breathed character of linguistic interest, the basselope:

  (#6)

The basselope is a hybrid of the basset hound and the antelope — a hybrid with a portmanteau name. The model for it is the celebrated jackalope:

The jackalope is a mythical animal of North American folklore (a so-called “fearsome critter”) described as a jackrabbit with antelope horns or deer antlers and sometimes a pheasant’s tail (and often hind legs). The word “jackalope” is a portmanteau of “jackrabbit” and “antalope”, an archaic spelling of “antelope”. (Wikipedia link)

  (#7)

(Note the wonky subject-verb agreement in the last sentence of the postcard’s text.)

The hand signal. Back to #4 and the gesture Steve Dallas is making in it:

Hook ‘em Horns is the slogan and hand signal of The University of Texas at Austin. Students and alumni of the university employ a greeting consisting of the phrase “Hook ‘em” or “Hook ‘em Horns” and also use the phrase as a parting good-bye or as the closing line in a letter or story.

The gesture is meant to approximate the shape of the head and horns of the UT mascot, the Texas Longhorn Bevo [seen on Steve Dallas's shirt in #4 with its tongue sticking out]. The sign is made by extending the index and pinky fingers while grasping the second and third fingers with the thumb. The arm is usually extended, but the sign can also be given with the arm bent at the elbow. The sign is often seen at sporting events, during the playing of the school song “The Eyes of Texas”, and during the playing of the school fight song “Texas Fight”. It is one of the most recognized hand signals of all American universities.

Bonus: penguin cartoon postings. An inventory of some penguin cartoons, on Language Log and this blog.

First, from Language Log Classic, a posting “Spheniscid-American? Polar American?”, with this Glen Le Lievre cartoon (which is no longer available in the LLC archives):

  (#8)

Then on New Language Log, in the posting “Ar(c)tic”, an Alex Hallatt Arctic Circle penguin cartoon.

On to this blog:

6/22/11  It doesn’t always stay in Vegas (link): a Michael Shaw penguin cartoon

12/14/11  Recognition (link): a Shannon Wheeler penguin cartoon

1/23/12   Happy Penguin Awareness Day (link): a captioning

3/4/12   The news for penguins (link): the claymation tv series Pingu; a 1937 animated cartoon “Peeping Penguins” by Dave and Max Fleisher

5/13/12   The penguin chronicles (link): an American Scientist cartoon by Leighton; two captionings

4/17/13   Penguins and tuxedos (link): 7 cartoons — a Bizarro with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos; a Carol Stokes cartoon on the Emperor’s new clothes; a Rob Cottingham cartoon on Linux; a Phil Selby cartoon with a foul-mouthed penguin; a Savage Chickens on the Last Supper; a Rob Middleton cartoon showing a penguin with Sigmund Freud; a Randy Glasbergen cartoon showing a penguin in the executive office

6/2/13   Penguin cartoon (link): a Rhymes With Orange showing a penguin that is not a flight risk


Osteoarthritic portmanteau

$
0
0

Today’s Frazz (via Robert Coren):

Ouch: ligament + mints (as in wintergreen).

On glucosamine:

Glucosamine is marketed to support the structure and function of joints and the marketing is targeted to people suffering from osteoarthritis. Commonly sold forms of glucosamine are glucosamine sulfate, glucosamine hydrochloride, and N-acetylglucosamine. Glucosamine is often sold in combination with other supplements such as chondroitin sulfate and methylsulfonylmethane. Of the three commonly available forms of glucosamine, only glucosamine sulfate is given a “likely effective” rating for treating osteoarthritis. (link)

And chondroitin:

Chondroitin sulfate is an important structural component of cartilage and provides much of its resistance to compression. Along with glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate has become a widely used dietary supplement for treatment of osteoarthritis. (link)

And then on the strip (and its two principal characters), which has appeared on Language Log and this blog a number of times over the years:

Frazz is a syndicated comic strip by Jef Mallett that, on the surface, is about school custodian Edwin “Frazz” Frazier and the school where he works, but which, according to Mallett, is really about discovery. The strip debuted on 2 April 2001.

… Frazz’s job is just the surface. He reads everything from Milton to Hiaasen to bike racing magazines, he writes, he races, he’s an athlete, and he’s a songwriter, discovering the value of a day job. When songwriting started going well, he kept his custodian job because it was the perfect environment for discovery through the energy and interest of the students. Many of the characters are based on his childhood experiences at school, and at home as the child of an educator.

… Caulfield – An eight-year-old named by his parents after J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Caulfield tried to convince Mrs. Olsen that he was from a disadvantaged background, but his father is finishing his PhD in pharmacology, and his mother is a civil engineer… He is a genius, but hates school because it fails to challenge him. He spends a lot of time in detention for speaking out in class, but whiles away the hours discussing books or logic with Frazz. His fresh perspective on the world brings interesting, often startling revelations to the comic. (link)

Language is often the focus of the strip.


Brief mention: telescoping

$
0
0

In my collection of linguistic errors (from both speech and writing) there are some of the telescoping, or “jump ahead” variety. Recently, in writing about young men judged to be twinkalicious / twinkilicious / etc., I was especially afflicted by this sort of error, in typing and in handwritten text. The sequence LI CI kept tempting me towards jumping ahead from the L to the I following the C, thus telescoping the sequence to LI and giving twinkalious etc. Very annoying.

Then there’s telescoping as an inadvertent error in speech — for instance, in two instances of Barack Obama inadvertently telescoped to Barama (and then corrected), as reported in this posting.

(Telescoped portmanteaus are also frequently committed intentionally, as in verminfestation ‘vermin infestation’ and teenius ‘teen genius’, reported in this posting.)


Onomatopoeia in the comics

$
0
0

Today’s Zippy:

The onomatopoetic lexical items murmur, yodel, belch, and gargle give Bill Griffith an excuse for the phrasal overlap portmanteau Yoko Onomatopoeia.


Comic vocabulary

$
0
0

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

Pig’s grasp of English vocabulary is somewhat unsteady. Faced with the unfamiliar surreptitious ‘kept secret, esp. because it would not be approved of’ (NOAD2), he guesses that it’s a portmanteau — of syrup and delicious. That means he’s treating a word that is clearly an adjective in context — in these surreptitious programs — as a noun, meaning ‘syrup that’s delicious’. But people are frequently uncertain about parts of speech, and cartoon animals can’t be expected to do better.


Saturday comics

$
0
0

Two cartoons this morning that hark back to familiar topics on this blog — A Zippy with barbats and a Mother Goose and Grimm with sporks:

(#1)

(#2)

Poindexter barbats — a recurrent theme in Zippy — were covered pretty thoroughly in my posting “The Dingburger bar bat or barbat” of 12/31/12. Barbat is presumably a N-N compound, but the object’s connection to bars and bats is not at all clear (even, apparently, to Zippy, despite the fact that the manufacture of barbats is a major industry in Dingburg and the fact that Zippy has a collection of them); we never see one of them depicted in the strip.

As for sporks, they come up when portmanteaus are mentioned on this blog (spork is a portmanteau word, referring to a combination object), notably in a posting “Spork” of 12/9/09 that features a Bizarro cartoon involving a spork-billed platypus. In #2, we are invited to muse on what the relationship was between the dish and the spoon in the Mother Goose rhyme. The dish ran away with the spoon, suggesting a romantic relationship.

But now the fickle dish has abandoned the spoon and run off with a spork. Are sporks better than spoons because they’re more versatile? Not in the real world, they’re not, but who knows how these things work in the world of utensil relationships.


More dubious portmanteaus

$
0
0

For the Fourth of July (Independence Day) weekend, an advertising campaign on the TLA Adult Gay Video site:

Celebrate Foreskindependence

(intended: foreskin + independence).

Meanwhile, for some time now the 76 gasoline firm (formerly Union 76) has been running a tv ad campaign against honkaholism (honk + alcoholism, or possibly honk + the libfix -aholism), an addiction to honking.

The first turns out not to convey the intended meaning — an Independence Day sale — very well; foreskins are not centrally involved in the matter, and in any case the term could be parsed as foreskin + dependence.

The second is clever and cute, but becomes annoying on repetition.

Foreskindependence. A preference for uncut men (men with intact foreskins) is a well-known taste of many gay men, and numerous videos cater specifically to this taste (while others cater to a taste for cut men), so even if you parse foreskindependence in the intended fashion, you’ll expect that the sale has something specifically to do with foreskins. But in fact, here are the main terms of the sale:

Freedom to Save Super Sale!
Get up to 25% off your entire order!
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (and women too) have a divine right to save huge, up to 25% off their order! Express your independence by buying anything and everything you want. Spend $49.99 and you’ll automatically get an extra 15% off your entire order. Spend $99.99 and you’ll automatically get an extra 20% off your order. Most fabulously of all, spend $149.99 or more and you’ll automatically get an extra 25% off your entire order! The more you buy, the more you save! This is why we fought the British, people. Do your patriotic duty and start shopping now!

Foreskins don’t come into it at all. It’s all about freedom, rights, and patriotism.

Honkaholism. From the NYT on 4/1/13, “Gasoline Brand Urges Drivers to Stop ‘Honkaholism’ “ by Stuart Elliott:

Efforts by a leading gasoline brand [76] to woo consumers in a nontraditional fashion are continuing with a light-hearted initiative aimed at discouraging a particularly annoying kind of vehicular noise pollution.

… The initiative urges drivers to stop “honkaholism” — the incessant beeping of car horns that bothers passengers, pedestrians and other drivers. It is styled like a public service campaign aimed at eradicating a societal ill, seeking to make people aware of the problem and then offering a solution.

For instance, the commercial — which can be watched on the special Web site, stophonkaholism.com, as well as on television — starts with an angry man behind the wheel of a car at a crosswalk, is honking loudly as bewildered children stare.

“Is your honking out of control?” a calm-voiced announcer asks. “You might be showing signs of honkaholism.”

“Now you can put an end to all the beeping honking,” the announcer continues, “with the 76 Honk Suppressor.” The reference is to the giveaway item, a toy shaped like a hockey puck that bears a resemblance to the Easy button from the Staples retail chain.

At the center of the Honk Suppressor, which can be attached to a dashboard, is a piece of red rubber or plastic bearing the 76 brand logo; when pressed down upon, it makes a bleating sound like a child’s doll or a dog’s squeaky toy.

The Honk Suppressor is “the perfectly safe honking alternative,” the announcer declares, “designed to wean even the most beeping honkers off their beeping.”

(Note the taboo-avoiding bleeping.)

I found this entertaining the first few times it came around. But eventually it became as annoying as, well, honking.

And I wonder whether the commercial has been effective — something that’s notoriously hard to gauge.



Sconic sections

$
0
0

From several sources on the net, this entertaining story posted 6/25/13 on the Evil Mad Scientist site:

Play with your food: How to Make Sconic Sections

The conic sections are the four classic geometric curves that can occur at the intersection between a cone and a plane: the circle, ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola.

The scone is a classic single-serving quick bread that is often served with breakfast or tea.

And, at the intersection of the two, we present something entirely new, delightfully educational, and remarkably tasty: Sconic Sections.

Detailed instructions follow. The edges of the sections can be highlighted by jam, chocolate, or Nutella (as above).

Sconic sections is a nice portmanteau of scone and conic sections — an excellent term for things that are both scones and conic sections.

Now, about scones, from Wikipedia:

A scone is a single-serving cake or quick bread. They are usually made of wheat, barley or oatmeal, with baking powder as a leavening agent, and are baked on sheet pans. They are often lightly sweetened and are occasionally glazed. The scone is a basic component of the cream tea or Devonshire tea. It differs from a tea cake and other sweet buns, which are made with yeast

On the pronunciation of scone, again from Wikipedia:

The pronunciation of the word within the United Kingdom varies. According to one academic study, two-thirds of the British population pronounce it /ˈskɒn/ with the preference rising to 99% in the Scottish population. This is also the pronunciation of Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders. Other regions, particularly the United States and Ireland, pronounce the word as /ˈskoʊn/. The pronunciation /ˈskʊn/ is also used, particularly in Ireland. British dictionaries usually show the “con” form as the preferred pronunciation, while recognising that the “cone” form also exists.

The difference in pronunciation is alluded to in the poem which contains the lines:

I asked the maid in dulcet tone
To order me a buttered scone
The silly girl has been and gone
And ordered me a buttered scone.

The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the first mention of the word was in 1513. Origin of the word scone is obscure and may, in fact, derive from different sources.

That’s three pronunciations for the word (four, if ɔ – a variation is taken into account). Then there’s the pronunciation of the proper name Scone – /ˈskuːn/ — which is still another. On the place and the Stone of Scone:

Scone … is a village in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. The medieval village of Scone, which grew up around the monastery and royal residence, was abandoned in the early 19th century when the residents were removed and a new palace was built on the site by the Earl of Mansfield. Hence the modern village of Scone, and the medieval village of Old Scone, can often be distinguished. (link)

The Stone of Scone …, also known as the Stone of Destiny and often referred to in England as The Coronation Stone, is an oblong block of red sandstone, used for centuries in the coronation of the monarchs of Scotland and later the monarchs of England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom. Historically, the artifact was kept at the now-ruined Scone Abbey in Scone, near Perth, Scotland. (link)


twerking

$
0
0

The latest dance rage. From Wikipedia:

Twerking is a “dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.’” To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips”.

The word “twerking” may be derived from one of two sources:

a contraction of “footwork”, or
a portmanteau of twist and jerk.

Ties have been made to many traditional African dances.

… Twerking was introduced into hip-hop culture by way of the New Orleans bounce music scene. In 1993 DJ Jubilee recorded the dance tune “Do The Jubilee All” in which he chanted, “Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk.” The video for the song increased the popularity of twerking. In 1995 New Orleans-based rapper Cheeky Blakk recorded the song “Twerk Something”, a call-and-response dance song dedicated to twerking. In 1997 DJ Jubilee recorded “Get Ready, Ready” in which he encouraged listeners to “Twerk it!”.

A great amount of credit for the expansion of twerking outside of New Orleans can be given to strip clubs in Houston and Atlanta.

Twerkers were predominantly black and female for quite some time, but now a major exponent of twerking is the very white Miley Cyrus, and men (both straight and gay, of various races and ethnicities) have gotten into shaking their booties. Here’s Julian Serrano (Juju) moving his butt in the hot video Julian Serrano Pretty Gang Twerk:

  (#1)

A still from this video (Serrano twerking his way through household chores):

(#2)

Serrano is also featured in the hilarious video Twerking to Classical Part 2: High Class Male Makeover (clips of twerkmen doing their thing, set to the William Tell Overture), here (#3).


Odds and ends: portmanteaus to penises

$
0
0

An accumulation of miscellanea: portmanteaus, porn flick and pornstar names, (in the continuing Remarkable Underwear series) black lace skivvies, and (in the continuing News for Penises series), the smallest penis in Brooklyn.

Portmanteaus. From Victor Steinbok, malternative from the Beer Advocate site, grillebrate from Dietz & Watson ads.

Victor writes that the first refers to

non-beer products that either qualify as “malt beverages” or are similarly spiked to serve as beer substitutes (e.g., Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice)

Beer Advocate posting “Reinvasion of the Malternatives” (2/13/02) here.

That’s malt + alternative; grillebrate is grill + celebrate — celebrate (summer) by grilling franks and sausages from Dietz & Watson, purveyors of “Premium Meats and Artisan Cheeses”. One promotion here, with grillebration as well as grillebrate.

Naming in porn. Name that porn flick, name that pornstar.

Enthusiastic ad copy:

Lucas Entertainment’s latest import from Great Britain, “Bangers and Ass,” features one of the sexiest international casts yet!

Yes, Bangers and Ass (a play on the name of the British dish bangers and mash ‘mashed potatoes and sausages’), in which guys use their sausages to bang ass.

From scene 3, a cropped photo of Tony Rivera banging Paul Walker:

  (#1)

On the pornstar front, recent finds include a guy with the porn name Jack or Jake Manhole (yes, he’s a bottom). Then I’ve posted on AZBlogX — warning: nudity and man-man sex — about the nicely named Jason Adonis and Race Cooper (Cooper is black). I don’t know if Adonis has been paired with Dionisio Heiderscheid, who makes gay videos under the name Dionisio or (most often) D.O.

Black lace skivvies. From Undergear, an offering of the Extreme line of lace underwear for men. Viewable in “Hot in black lace” on AZBlogX here, along with a couple photos of underwear model James Guardino. Only one of these images skirts the X line, but I put them on my X blog because there’s not much of linguistic interest (though the ad copy is entertaining).

The smallest penis in Brooklyn. Well, the smallest one on a guy who was willing to enter a contest for the title. From Betsy Herrington, a story (by Victor Jeffries II, from today) about the event:

  (#2)

NSFW: The Delivery Man Has the Smallest Penis In Brooklyn

Saturday afternoon, King County Bar in Brooklyn hosted the first annual Smallest Penis in Brooklyn Pageant. Six contestants, only five of which made it to the final round (contestant number 6, a tourist from France, got debilitatingly inebriated with his wife and had to bow out), participated in 3 rounds of intense competition for the prized designation and $200.

… The contestants — Perry Winkle, Sugar Daddy, Rip van Dinkle, Quinette (our French friend), The Delivery Man, and Flo Rider — opened the competition with the evening wear round. Our humble competitors donned satin baby socks sewn to thongs, adorned with bow ties and buttons, and sauntered up and down the bar in front of a crowd of over 100 incredibly supportive audience members.

Round two, the talent round, brought out dance numbers, hand made farting sounds, and jokes. The third and final round featured swimwear—tulle sewn to a an elastic band.

There was confirmation by tape measure.

The story has lots of (not veery good) pictures. But it looks like the contestants, and especially the winner, were in the micropenis range. From Wikipedia:

Micropenis is an unusually small penis. A common criterion is a dorsal (measured on top) erect penile length of at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean human penis size, or smaller than about 7cm (3 inches) for an adult when compared to an average erection of 12.5cm (5 inches)… The term is most often used medically when the rest of the penis, scrotum, and perineum are without ambiguity… Micropenis occurs in about 0.6% of males.

Note that micropenis is used in the entry as the name of a condition (like cleft palate) and so lacks an article. The variant He has micropenis appears to be the most common usage on the net, but He has a micropenis occurs as well.


barihunk

$
0
0

Portmanteau of the week: barihunk (baritone + hunk). And the barihunk of the moment is Andrew Garland, shirtless:

(#1)

(Hat tip to Arne Adolfsen on Facebook.)

This is from the Barihunks website, which says:

This site is dedicated to any hunk who sings in the baritone and bass/baritone range. Singers must be professional, semi-professional or serious students with real potential.

Here’s Garland working out in his Barihunk t-shirt:

(#2)

In the musical news on the site (from 7/25/13):

The Sexiest Baritone Hunks from Opera: Andrew Garland to appear in Ned Rorem tribute

We recently featured Andrew Garland in the Cincinnati Opera’s announcement of their new season. We’ve now learned that he’s appearing in the new season of the New York Festival of Song under the auspices of the beloved Steven Blier.

He will be joined by the amazing mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey in a musical birthday tribute to the great American composer Ned Rorem. Although Rorem wrote opera, the concert will present highlights from his successful career as a songwriter. Rorem has been dubbed “America’s Schubert” because of the 500 songs that he has written in his 90 years, many of which regularly appear on recital programs. Lindsey and Garland will also perform works by Rorem’s friends and inspirations, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, Theodore Chanler, Aaron Copland, Noël Coward, Francis Poulenc, and Virgil Thomson.

The site takes the music seriously and the men as well.


Two portmanteaus in the mail

$
0
0

Two portmanteaus in my mail: a hybrid animal (not new on this blog, but offered here because I now have a really adorable photo) and yet another way of referring to the male anus viewed as a sexual organ.

zonkey. This recent story, here from Good Morning America (passed on to me by Victor Steinbok yesterday): “Rare Italian-born Baby Zonkey in Good Health” by Jon M. Chang:

One part zebra, one part donkey, all parts fuzzy and adorable. Ippo, the foal of a male zebra and a female donkey, was reported to be in good health, just a few days after it was born at an animal reserve in Florence, Italy.

The story of Ippo’s birth reads like the equine equivalent of a romance novel. The father is a zebra that was adopted by the animal reserve after he was rescued from a failing zoo. The mother is a Donkey of Amiata, an endangered animal species.

Even though a fence separated the two animals at the animal reserve, the zebra climbed over and mated with the donkey, producing Ippo. Serena Aglietti, one of the employees at the reserve, said in a statement, “Ippo is the only one of her kind in Italy.”

Zonkeys made a brief appearance in this blog earlier this year, in connection with the portmanteau Marabomber:

Marabomber is a telescoping portmanteau, abbreviating the compound N Marathon bomber. Other portmanteaus are related to copulative compounds;

In some cases, the combination of referents is akin to chemical compounding: a nectaplum ['nectarine plum'] (here) isn’t both a nectarine and a plum, but a hybrid of the two (similarly, tigons and ligers, etc. here). (link)

The second link is to a posting by Ben Zimmer on animal hybrids:

In modern times, when new animal hybrids are engineered by interbreeding, they are often given name-blends: the offspring of a male lion and female tiger is a liger, the offspring of a male tiger and female lion is a tigon, the offspring of a male zebra and female donkey is a zedonk or zonkey, and so forth. The earliest such interbred name-blend that I’m aware of is cattalo, a cattle-buffalo hybrid dating to 1888 (now [superseded] by beefalo). (link)

mangina. Commenting on my man pussy posting, Mike Thomas noted the portmanteau mangina (man + vagina) as yet another alternative to the ones I listed in that posting for the meaning, ‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ’. (I thought I’d posted on mangina already, but apparently not.)

Occurrences of mangina in this sense seem to be few, even in gay porn, and mostly jocular, and there are competing uses of the word — in particular, two senses in which a man can have a vagina. First, there’s the case of Buck Angel, “the man with a pussy”, shown in a photo (#8) in an AZBlogX posting:

Angel is a FTM transsexual who chose not to have genital surgery, so has an intact vagina (while being otherwise highly masculine in appearance and behavior). Angel’s man pussy really is a pussy.

Put in other words, Angel’s mangina really is a vagina.

Then there’s the Mangina Man, who underwent penile inversion. In his own words:

Did you ever fantasize about a real bio man (not an Female To Male transsexual) having a vagina?  I was born male with a 9 inch cock that I had surgically inverted to create a “Mangina” in 1988. I am not a female with a vagina who is disguising her true sex to appear male, but I am a real natal/genetic man with a totally UNREAL FAKE pussy.  My tight, wet, juicy, self-lubricating pussy tastes like cock and balls, because in reality it IS cock and balls, just rearranged.  And I still cum like any other dude — the internal ejaculatory plumbing is all the same.  Also, for those who are wondering, it still smells like male genitalia and not like female. (link)

(I hope very much that he wasn’t born with a 9-inch cock. That’s a sentence that cries out for rewriting.)

 


Viewing all 311 articles
Browse latest View live