Today’s Bizarro:

A somewhat strained portmanteau of Frankenstein and Santa Claus — metrically similar two-part names. But an odd image.

Three recent items: robophobic, fungineering, fracktacular. Three sightinga, among many for each of these.

robophobic. From Maureen Dowd in the NYT, “Mommy, the Drone’s Here”, 12/4/13:

Law enforcement agencies are eager to get drones patrolling the beat. And The Wrap reported that in the upcoming Sony remake of “RoboCop,” Samuel L. Jackson’s character, a spokesman for a multinational conglomerate that has to manufacture a special RoboCop with a conscience for America (still traumatized by “The Terminator,” no doubt) scolds Americans for being “robophobic.”

Of course, for the robophopic [robotropic would be the usual opposite], there is already a way to get goods almost immediately: Go to the store.

robophobe, robophobia, robophobic all involve the combining form -phobe.

fungineering. From Oliver Burkeman in the NYT, “Who Goes to Work to Have Fun?”, 12/12/13:

Enjoyable jobs are surely preferable to boring or unpleasant ones; moreover, studies suggest that happy employees are more productive ones. But it doesn’t follow that the path to this desirable state of affairs is through deliberate efforts, on the part of managers, to try to generate fun. Indeed, there’s evidence that this approach — which has been labeled, suitably appallingly, “fungineering” — might have precisely the opposite effect, making people miserable and thus reaffirming one of the oldest observations about happiness: When you try too hard to obtain it, you’re almost guaranteed to fail.

This one is a relatively straightforward portmanteau (fun + engineering).

fractacular. A head from the Economist of 12/23/13, p. 12, about the U.S. passion for fracking: fractackular: frack plus the libfix -tacular (originally from spectacular), which has come up in these precincts on several occasions.

Two headline items, one definitely linguistic, the other entertaining mostly because of the content.

Garden path. From Barbara Partee on the 16th, this garden path construction, about which Barbara said

the fact that it definitely garden pathed me shows that syntactic processing is faster than (at least some kinds of) pragmatic processing: “Neighbor of Ohio girl found dead in trash arrested”.

I got this one right on the first reading, but many readers did not.

Amazing events. Then, from Wonkette today, two heads whose pleasures are mostly from the absurd situations described, though the heads have pleasures of their own:

Trailer Park Superhero: The Methylator: Oregon Meth Binge Generates 2013′s greatest headline:

We don’t just drag this out for any old story. We didn’t think that any story could possibly top the November 2012 headline from Scott Lake, Washington: “Two Alligators, A Pole Dancer And Pot At Olympia Area Shooting Scene”. And yet we knew it was at least theoretically possible, however unlikely.

And now, dear readers, we may finally have a winner — we’ll let you decide. From aggregation site PoliceOne.com, we present the new challenger: “Oregon man on meth fights off 12 cops while masturbating in bar”.

(Note the portmanteau methylator in the headline.)

Two recent cartoons, a Bizarro and a Dilbert:

(#1)

Either a portmanteau of pseudo and sudoku, or just a pun on sudoku,

(#2)

Comic-strip etymology.

The libfix -gate seems to be irresistible, trotted out for all sorts of public fusses; discussion here. Recent example, reported by Victor Steinbok on ADS-L:

According to MediaBistro, there’s now yet another -gate. Newly crowned NYC Mayor [Bill de Blasio] was caught on camera eating pizza with a fork, which is sacrilege in NYC. Appropriately, the affair has been dubbed “forkgate”, lack of coverup notwithstanding…

Like most -gate formations, this will surely be short-lived. Then Joel Berson suggested on ADS-L that Gate-gate is likely to come upon us,

for the scandalous way in which the former Secretary of Defense [Gates] has dissed the present VPOTUS

Previously coined for a silly British scandal involving David Cameron, detailed in 2012 here (among other places).

And then Larry Horn chimed in with some overlap portmanteaus involving -gate:

two of my fave combo-gates, Underwatergate (the blowing up of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior by, as it turned out, agents of the French government) and Pearlygate (one or maybe more of the televangelist brouhahas).  I may be missing a couple…oh, right, Whitewatergate.  Love those overlaps.

A sudden avalanche of linuistically interesting cartoons, on a variety of topics.

Word confusion. On Facebook, via David Preston, this Rubes cartoon:

(#1)

rapture / raptor: near-homonyms, so open for confusion.

(On Rubes, see here.)

Then three cartoons this morning: a Zits, a Bizarro, a Rhymes.

Zits: band names. Freely chosen or invented proper names make a rich topic of investigation. The enormous number of rock bands provide an especially nice source of data. Here’s a Zits on the subject:

(#2)

Bizarro labradoodle. The labradoodle is a canine cross, between a labrador retriever and a poodle; the name is a portmanteau. Here’s a Bizarro that pulls out the doodle as an independent element, referring to a cartoon:

(#3)

Rhymes With Orange on tone in e-mails. It’s notoriously difficult to communicate emotional attitudes on-line. Hence this cartoon:

(#4)

Deliberately marking sarcasm is a somewhat self-defeating strategy; sarcasm and irony are normally communicated indirectly.

From Kim Darnell, a link to this HuffPo piece,”These 19 Adorably Awkward Mixed Breed Dogs Will Make You Love Mutts Even More” by Amanda Scherker on 1/29/14. In the tradition of established mixed breeds like the labradoodle and cockapoo come more, mostly with portmanteau names to go along with the breed crossing.

Some of the offerings:

pitsky: pit bull + husky
schnoodle: schnauzer + poodle
puggle: pug + beagle
horgi: husky + corgi
pugapoo: pug + poodle
chusky: chow chow + husky
corgipoo: corgi + toy poodle
siberpoo: Siberian husky + poodle
alusky: husky + Alaskan malamute
cheagle: chihuahua + beagle

Here’s a siberpoo puppy:

A Wondermark cartoon (of 2/3/14), passed on by Roey Gafter:

Zoological crosses, with inventive names.

Yesterday Mark Liberman posted on this Doonesbury cartoon:

Rich in material. The main thing I want to note (as Mark did) is a sense development in the slang verb rock, from an older sense, around at least since 1990 (‘impact strongly’), to a newer sense, the one in the cartoon, around since at least 2007 (‘wear or display conspicuously or proudly’); this is a change from a more objective sense to a more subjective one, such as Elizabeth Traugott has repeatedly discussed.

(On the cartoon: it’s from 1/18/13 and was posted, and discussed, on Slate (here) on 2/8/13; apparently, many readers didn’t get the sense of rock in it.)

Further remarks:

in the first panel, the clipping do for hair-do from Joanie Caucus’s grand=daughter Alex;

in the second, the snowclonelet X queeni in make-over queen, from Joanie;

then from Alex, “way to rock the snark but so not you”, with the new sense of rock, plus the slang noun snark (apparently a portmanteau of snide and remark) and GenX so (discussed many times on this blog) in so not you.

Note the explicit comment on generational differences in slang use.

(In the original posting, I had Alex and Joanie exchanged.)

One topic touched on in the Stanford Freshman Seminar 63N (Linguistics in the Comics) was the representation of dialect, especially regional, rural, and non-standard varieties. We chose to look at Southern, especially Appalachian, varieties.

For the most part, the comics are a popular, rather than an elite or arty, medium, and dialect representation (especially Irish-influenced and German-influenced varieties) were well represented in American comics in the early days. (There were exceptions early on — the fantastical and often experimental Little Nemo in Slumberland, for example — and now graphic novels are a serious variety of fiction — but for the most part the comics were a form of broad popular entertainment.)

Given all this, it’s somewhat surprising that representations of Southern vernacular, often broad and exaggerated, didn’t appear in the comics until the 1930s.

It started with Li’l Abner in 1934, the first strip to be set in the South. From Wikipedia:

Li’l Abner is a satirical American comic strip that appeared in many newspapers in the United States, Canada and Europe, featuring a fictional clan of hillbillies in the impoverished mountain village of Dogpatch, Arkansas. Written and drawn by Al Capp (1909–1979), the strip ran for 43 years, from August 13, 1934 through November 13, 1977.

According to Capp, Yokum was a portmanteau of yokel and hokum. Li’l Abner himself was scarceness little (he was a strapping 6′3″). He was, however, charmingly clueless.

The main characters were Abner Yokum, his diminutive parents Mammy and Pappy Yokum, and Daisy Mae Scragg (ultimately Yokum). Here they all are together, in the midst of a flood:

(#1)

Right on the heels of Li’l Abner, still in 1934, came Snuffy Smith. From Wikipedia:

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, originally Barney Google, is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. Since its debut on June 17, 1919, the strip has gained a huge international readership, appearing in 900 newspapers in 21 countries. The initial appeal of the strip led to its adaptation to film, animation, popular song and television.

… In 1934, an even greater change took place when Barney [Google] and his horse [Spark Plug] visited the North Carolina mountains and met a volatile, equally diminutive moonshiner named Snuffy Smith. Hillbilly humor was extremely popular at the time (as Al Capp was proving with Li’l Abner ). The strip increasingly focused on the southern Appalachian hamlet of “Hootin’ Holler”, with Snuffy as the main character. The mountaineer locals are extremely suspicious of any outsiders, referred to as “flatlanders” or even worse, “revenooers” (Federal Revenue agents).

Eventually, the strip passed into the hands of Fred Lasswell:

Fred Lasswell started his career as a sports cartoonist for the Tampa Daily Times around 1928. His work attracted the attention of Billy DeBeck, creator of the newspaper strip ‘Barney Google and Snuffy Smith’, in 1933. Fred Lasswell became his assistant, aged 17, and took over the famous strip after DeBeck’s death in 1942 (link)

This Snuffy Smith (from Lasswell) was a discussion topic in the Stanford seminar on February 11th:

(#2)

Next came Pogo, with a very different tone: a strip set in a real place, the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia and Florida (or at least a fantasy of the place), but with mostly (eventually, entirely) animal characters. Typically pointed but sweet. (A number of Pogos are available on this blog.)

[Walt] Kelly created the characters of Pogo the possum and Albert the alligator in 1941 for issue #1 of Dell’s Animal Comics, in the story “Albert Takes the Cake.” (Wikipedia link)

Finally, in 1945 came a farcical version of the Southern strip, the Plenty family in the Dick Tracy strip. From Wikipedia:

The Plenty family was a group of goofy redneck yokels headed by the former villain, Bob Oscar (“B.O.”) [first appeared in 1945, along with the play on B.O. 'body odor'], along with Gertrude (“Gravel Gertie”) Plenty [and B.O.'s brother Goodin, as in the licorice candy Good & Plenty; and the daughter of the family, Sparkle Plenty].

As I said in a 2012 posting on Dick Tracy:

So Gould dipped into hillbilly humor, in the spirit of Li’l Abner and the Snuffy Smith of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

On the linguistics here, from class handout #6 (February 11th):

Representations of dialect understood as non-standard varieties (in comics, fiction, etc.) may use features that are

(a) generally associated with vernacular (e.g. multiple negation), whether or not they are features of the specific dialect

(b) eye dialect (spelling words in nonstandard ways associated with speech, e.g. wanna, uv)

(c) specific local, dialect/region/social features [or stereotypes of these]

From Benjamin Slade, pointers to Chris Hallbeck’s webcomic site Minimumble, with three recent language-related cartoons:

From 2/12/14, treating procrastinator as pro + castinator, with pro treated as a clipping of professional  and so contrasted with amateur (link):

(#1)

From 2/14/14, language play extracting panda from pandemonium (link):

(#2)

From 2/24/14, a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) (link):

(#3)

Bed Bath and Beyond (the retail chain) overlapped with Beyond Thunderdome (the movie).

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, packed with cultural allusions:

First, the setting: From the title (“The matinee”) and the visual (an audience, in raked seating, all viewing something on the wall in front of them, what might be a tub of popcorn in front of one of them, we’re in a movie theatre. And the audience is bugs.

Then the caption, “Gone With the Windex”, an overlap portmanteau of Gone With the Wind and Windex: two more cultural allusions, plus (in the first case) a mention of two characters, Ashley and Scarlett.

From Wikipedia:

Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American epic historical romance film adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel and produced by David O. Selznick, of Selznick International Pictures. Set in the 19th-century American South, the film tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh, and her romantic pursuit of Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) who is married to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland), and her marriage to Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, the story is told from the perspective of white Southerners.

And on Windex:

Windex is a glass and hard-surface cleaner manufactured since 1933. S. C. Johnson acquired Windex in 1993 and has been manufacturing it since.

How does Windex come into things? Via a trope about bugs and windshields: Windex is what you use to get squashed bugs off the windshields of cars. On windshields and bugs, consider the Dire Straits song: “The Bug”, with lyrics by Mark Knopfler, including the lyrics:

Sometimes you’re the windshield
Sometimes you’re the bug
Sometimes it all comes together, baby
Sometimes you’re a fool in love

(Note the half-rhyme bug / love.)

And consider the character Scarlett’s warning to the character Ashley in the movie exchange embedded within the cartoon: “Watch out for the car!!!”

That’s a lot to assemble in making sense of a single-panel cartoon, even with the metatext provided.

A Get Fuzzy cartoon, passed on by Billy Green on Facebook:

Two forms of name play here: a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) combining the artist formerly known as Prince (the musician) and Prince Valiant (the comics character); and then a play on the naming formula X and the Y(s) for musical groups (Prince and the Revolution, etc.), giving the groanworthy  O.J. and the Simpsons (combining O.J. Simpson and the Simpsons animated cartoon). Again, huge amounts of sociocultural knowledge required.

Today’s Zippy:

A rush of verbs, and then blaundry (bowling + laundry).

Passed on by Jonathan Lighter, this story of the 4th from Herald Scotland:, “Meet Farmer Murphy’s geep (or shoat): now what will he call it?”

An Irish farmer who claims to have bred a cross between a sheep and a goat is seeking a name for the rare offspring.

… Similar crossings have been reported before in Chile, Jamaica, Malta and in Botswana, where scientists found a hybrid – known as the Toast of Botswana – had 57 chromosomes, a number in between that of sheep and goats.

In most cases the offspring is stillborn.

A photo:

The genetic status of the creature is still to be determined. (You’ll note the Herald Scotland‘s caution in reporting this part of the story: “claims to have bred a cross…”)

On the linguistic front, one strategy for naming such a hybrid is compounding: a copulative compound like sheep-goat or goat-sheep. Another choice is a portmanteau, essentially a compact version of a copulative compound (reflecting the hybridity of such a creature by a fused linguistic form): geep or shoat.

Shoat would be a bad choice, since the word has an already established use, for ‘a young pig, esp. one that is newly weaned’ (NOAD2). Geep sounds silly to me, but that’s just my personal aesthetic judgment.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Phrasal overlap portmanteaus (POPs) come up on this blog again and again; they are expressions of the form A B C, where the three parts are all words or combining forms and where A + B and B + C are both words or phrases.

The Rhymes has a somewhat different way of combining three such elements: the first element is shared with each of the two others — factored out, as it were. That is, A + B and A + C are both words or phrases, in this case paranormal and paralegal, with the combining form para- factored out. The cartoon provides a context in which both expressions make sense.

Today’s crop of cartoons includes a Bizarro, a Zippy, and a Mother Goose and Grimm:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

In #1, the kid is obviously a cartoon character, while his parents are represented as what count as “ordinary people” in the comics, that is, “realistically” (think Mary Worth), though the father looks suspiciously like the God figure in Zippy. In any case, it’s a metacartoon.

In #2, for four panels Griffy ruminates on astrophysics while Zippy quotes advertising slogans. An odd sort of antiphony, the two voices having nothing whatsoever to do with one another. (Antiphony is normally a kind of conversation between voices.)

Finally, in #3, we find edible punctuation, and more. On the first two diner stools we have a question mark and an explanation point, and the latter is ordering donut holes (not necessarily understood as puctuation marks, plus donut asterisks (* makes a tricky baking), and corned beef and hashtags (note phrasal overlap portmanteau: corned beef and hash + hashtag, marked by #).

Then on the last stool, a percent sign, and behind the counter, a dollar sign. On the order board, three punctuational puns, naming things to drink or eat (with the colon, the comma, and the caret).

Today’s Zippy:

Griffy and Zippy contemplate the end of the world, and Griffy wonders if Schadenfreude would be appropriate in the situation. Zippy then takes it one step further with the POp (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Schadenfreudian slip (Schadenfreude + Freudian slip) — except that he puns on slip, calling up slipping on a banana peel.

Others have used the POP to play in other ways on slip. Here’s a set of Flickr photos with slip the article of clothing. And here a very brief YouTube video with Schadenfreudian slip conveying ‘accidentally letting someone know you’re glad they’re a failure’ (if you’re not experienced with Australian English, be prepared to listen to this one several times to reassure yourself that I’ve transcribed it correctly).

Five cartoons from recent days. Not one of them seems to have anything to do with (US) Mothers Day (but maybe tomorrow, on the day itself, Mom will surface). A daydreaming Jeremy in Zits; a Calvin and Hobbes on following rules; a Rhymes With Orange with a groan-inducing (but learnèd) pun; and a Bizarro and a Zippy on different aspects of modern communication.

The Zits:

(#1)

A portmanteau of daydreaming and streaming.

The Calvin and Hobbes:

(#2)

Kids do sometimes play with the rules of games (in small ways), though they have strong impulses to “do it right”. Similarly, people of all ages innovate in language (again, mostly in small ways, especially lexical items). In addition, kids sometimes invent (what they see as) totally new games, with their own rules; and occasionally they invent private languages.

The inventions require kids — usually just in pairs — who are psychologically very close; twins are particularly inclined to engage in such innovations, both in games and language. Calvin and Hobbes are a special case here, since Hobbes is in a sense Calvin’s twin — a projection of part of Calvin’s personality. No surprise, then, that Calvin finds it especially satisfying to play just with Hobbes!

The Rhymes With Orange:

(#3)

Appreciating the pun in the strip requires that you know about the myth of Sisyphus, including the task assigned to Sisyphus. In the strip, of course, it’s not a giant boulder that Sisyphus pushes up the mountain again and again, but a giant ball of yarn that a cat has to deal with.

The Bizarro:

(#4)

Here, a classic gag-cartoon trope, the message in the bottle, is updated to embrace the age of cellphones.

Finally, the Zippy, dealing with a phenomenon I looked at in this posting, where two contributions to the lack of shared culture are briefly examined: data overload that comes from data piling up as you age, and another overload that comes from now having so many different sources of information.

Four recent cartoons, on varied subjects: two One Big Happy strips; a Bizarro with a portmanteau; and an ecard-like strip.

The first OBH, on invented words and lying:

(#1)

The second OBH, on words (here, the physical form of printed number words, that is on numerals) vs. the things to which words refer (here, numbers, considered as mathematical objects). The first can be phyaically halved , i.e., divided into two parts of equal size; if the division is made along the vertical axis, one part looks like an epsilon, the other like the numeral 3, but if the division is made along the horizontal axis, the two parts each look like the numeral 0 or the letter O:

(#1)

But someone who asks what “half of eight” is is asking about the number, not the numeral, and is expecting “four” as the correct answer.

On to a very silly portmanteau in the Bizarro:

(#3)

That’s paparazzi (those annoying photographers) + pepperoni (as a topping for pizza).

Finally, a wry ecard-like cartoon on the half-full / half-empty trope, with a surprise (and vulgar) resolution:

(#4)

This came to me on the I Fucking Love Science site; I don’t know who the creator is.