Two recent items that challenge the borders of categories in the world of art, literature, and humor: another Jane Austen quote (yes, Chris Ambidge keeps sending them on); and an e-card (passed on by Victor Steinbok because of the entertaining portmanteau on it).

Another Jane. This one’s from Mansfield Park:

(#1)

These Austen quotations are like framed samplers: quotations isolated as, (metaphorically) framed as, worth our attention. Slogans as art forms. The visual content is minimal, mostly a suggestion of the late 18th / early 19th century English genteel social life.

The e-card portmanteau. e-cards are similar, but the sentiments are invented rather than quoted from known writers, and they are intended to be funny, usually in a snarky or wry way; they are jokes of a kind. The illustrations are rarely crucial to the humor, but serve to enhance the text. This week’s example:

(#2)

An entertaining portmanteau of cardboard (as in cardboard box) and Bordeaux (wine), with /bɔrd/ as overlap.

Texty creations. In both examples, text (rather than image) is the crucial component, and the result is intended as art, humor, or narrative (often two or more of these at once) — making these creations hard to classify, as I’ve often pointed out on this blog.

Some other examples:

works by Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha (among others), conventionally classified as art, despite the centrality of the texts in them

words-only cartoons (see here), “slogans presented as cartoons”, especially in webcomics:

Close to the words-only end of the scale are, for instance, Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, considered here, and Dante Shepherd’s Surviving the World, considered here: captioning as art.

or simply captioning of existing images, period, as in efforts of mine posted on this blog and AZBlogX over the years

other creations that think of themselves as webcomics but can be thought of as very long captions for minimal images, for instance in the Oatmeal effort “How British accents sound to Americans” (here), where the visual contributes almost nothing; this is a comic text

and the works of Jack Handey:

Jack Handey (born 25 February 1949) is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes [with background illustrations that are irrelevant to the jokes]

A Handey sampler:

(#3)

From Jane Austen to Jack Handey. A long strange trip.

Now from Taco Bell, a hybrid food with a hybrid (portmanteau) name. You can critique the food — a double-Mexican combo, of quesadilla and burrito — or the name (Quesarito, which strikes me as reasonably euphonious, unlike cronut or Flatizza), or both. (Links to foodmanteau postings, up to mid-2013, here.)

Not everyone has found the Quesarito tasty, however.

Here’s Will Gordon on the Deadspin site yesterday, with “Taco Bell’s Quesarito: A Fast-Food Love Affair Gone Awry”:

Hybrid foods are hit or miss. When they’re honest attempts to expand the human dining experience by combining the virtues of two or more complementary yet previously segregated items, the results can be extraordinary. Pizza bagels, peanut butter cups, and Jell-O shots are classic examples of disparate foods joining forces to increase global happiness. [For me, peanut butter cups are at the top of the pop-food pantheon. Pizza bagels are ok. And I've never done Jell-O shots, because I don't care for Jell-O, and I want my alcohol to have an attractive taste of its own.]

But far too often, you end up with a worthless joke of a Frankenfood that was clearly cobbled together just for the sake of novelty. Ramen burgers, turduckens, and car bomb shots are prime examples of compound foodstuffs that would have been better left to their own devices.

… Now [Taco Bell is] coming at us with the Quesarito, a half-assed collision of preexisting conditions masquerading as the cronut for the Mountain Dew-in-the-morning set. A Quesarito is a quesadilla wrapped around a burrito. This means that instead of having cheese inside a normal burrito, you have it trapped inside the double-hulled tortilla of your burrito. The innovation here is to give you more bland, pasty tortilla to chaw through on your way to the underwhelming mess of rice, meat, sour cream, and not-hot sauce trapped inside.

Gordon seethes on from there.

Meanwhile, I have

Ay, ay, ay, ay …
Quesalito lindo

stuck in my head.

Today’s Bizarro:

A labradoodle performing magic: abracadabra [the magical incantation] + labradoodle = abracadabradoodle.

But labradoodle is itself a portmanteau: labrador (retriever) + poodle.

There are obvious limits to how far such layering can go on, since the bits of the contributing words quickly become hard to retrieve — though an illustration might help, as here.

From the 7/12/14 Economist, this feature: “Matches made in heaven—and hell: What do you get if you cross a waffle with a doughnut? It’s no joke”, beginning:

Not all marriages are happy, but Alex Hernandez thinks that the union of a waffle and a doughnut will be. The owner of Waffles Café in Chicago starting selling what he calls “wonuts” in April. They are deep-fried waffles, topped with icing and multicoloured sprinkles (see photo). Daily sales went from 24 to 600 within two days.

Ah, the foodmanteau wonut. Referring to a hybrid food:

The Economist continues:

Hybrid dishes are fashionable. The wonut follows the cronut, a croissant-donut combination that was invented in New York last year and is now being fried and munched in Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Britain — and even France, where you’d think diners would be fussier. [On cronuts on this blog, see here and here.]

Many countries indulge in culinary mixing, but Americans, who love both novelty and food, are especially keen on it. Burger King’s Croissan’Wich is a croissant-sandwich mix. Taco Bell’s quesarito is a beef burrito wrapped in a quesadilla. [The Quesarito on this blog here.] J&D’s Foods produces Baconnaise, bacon-flavoured mayonnaise that is, oddly, vegetarian and kosher-certified. Carl’s Jr is testing a bisnut, a cross between a biscuit (in the American sense of the word) and a doughnut. Not everyone is impressed.

… Such innovation has a long history. Blacks who migrated north after the Civil War served African-spiced fried chicken with European waffles. [On chicken and waffles on this blog, see here.] In the 1910s, Americans drenched German frankfurters with Mexican chili to make chili dogs. More recently, New Yorkers drew on the collective genius of generations of Jewish and Italian cooks to produce: the pizza bagel.

There are hybrid foods resulting from cultural contact, which typically have syntactically complex names (coordinate in chicken and waffles, compound in chili dog). And there are invented hybrids, which typically are given “clever” — hopefully, memorable — portmanteau names (like wonut) as a selling point.

On a separate front, if you look at recent developments in the worlds of bagels and doughnuts, you’ll see that though the constituent breadstuffs continue to differ clearly (though there are several styles in both cases), the toppings for them have been inclined to cross over in sometimes surprising ways: bagels with many kinds of sweet toppings, doughnuts with a variety of seed toppings. The result is still more kinds of sweet foods; Americans do like sweet.

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:

A POP — phrasal overlap portmanteau — combining the clipped compound mani-pedi (a manicure plus a pedicure; see here) and the compound pedicab ‘pedal-operated taxi’.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Portmanteau: orca (aka killer whale) + orchestra. A wonderfully silly idea.

It starts with today’s Doonesbury –

(#1)

and ends with shirtless lycanthrophy. In between: Roland Hedley, III, the apps Tinder and Grindr (with some shirtlessness), geosocial networking (aka geosocial), and professional lycanthrope Tyler Posey (appearing shirtless). A long strange trip.

Hedley. The Doonesbury features the character Roland Hedley. From Wikipedia:

Roland Burton Hedley, III is a fictional character in the comic strip Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, inspired by the on-air style of the veteran US reporter Sam Donaldson.

… [At one point in the strip] he has developed an extraordinarily large ego, which remains his defining trait to this day. He is a total sensationalist, willing to stretch the truth and say anything that would further his career.

What a douchebag, on the job and in his social life (as seen above)! (More douchebag below.)

Tinder. In the third panel of #1, an insert declares the topic of the remainder of the cartoon: “Adventures in Tinder”.

From Wikipedia:

Tinder is a matchmaking mobile app. The application connects with users’ Facebook profiles to provide pictures and ages for other users to view. Using GPS technology, users can set a specific radius, and they will have the option to match with anyone that is within that distance.

On the Tinder site itself:

Tinder is how people meet. It’s like real life, but better.

Let’s face it: Tinder is designed for more-or-less instant sexual hookups, without further commitment, between men and women. Quickie fucks for heterosexuals.

There’s net discussion on what works well in Tinder. One piece of advice for men is to post photos with their dog or dogs; adorable dogs suggests adorable men.

But some guys go for more carnal things — like this shirtless university student (University of Rhode Island, presumably) showing off his model’s body:

(#2)

(Don’t know how many women go for this presentation, but it would certainly catch the eye of many gay men. Still, he could use a puppy.)

Grindr. Tinder is relatively new — its initial release was 9/15/12 — but it’s been flourishing. It seems to have been modeled on the immensely successful app Grindr:

Grindr [initial release 3/25/09] is a geosocial networking application geared towards gay, bisexual, and bi-curious men.(Wikipedia link)

Grindr has expanded its software to provide filters for a variety of male “types”, among them:

Bear, Clean-cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz [HIV-positive], Rugged, Trans and Twink

From the Grindr site:

Find local gay, bi and curious guys for dating or friends for free on Grindr. Meet the men nearest you with GPS, location-based Grindr.

(Yeah, sure, “dating or friends”. Code for: let’s fuck now.)

The profiles can be unpleasant. In fact, several users have assembled galleries of “Grindr douchebags” or “douchebags of Grindr”, for instance:

(#3)

A classic “fags” vs. “real men” distinction: NO FAGS.

Geosocial networking and the noun geosocial. On the Grindr Wikipedia page, we see the technical term geosocial networking, which seems to be a portmanteau of geolocation [via GPS] and social networking — both originally technical terms themselves, though they’ve moved into more ordinary use.

From Wikipedia, in a heavily technical-register article:

Geosocial Networking is a type of social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. User-submitted location data or geolocation techniques can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests.

Later in the article:

The evolution of geosocial can be traced back to …

A nouning by truncation of geosocial networking to geosocial, suggesting that the writer of the sentence was so comfortable in this domain that they could abbreviate the longer expression, expecting the reader to interpret it in context.

Tyler Posey. And here’s where I came across the Tyler Poser story. From E! Online on the 5th, “Tyler Posey Jokes That He Has a Grindr Account (That’s a Gay Hookup App FYI)” by Brett Malec:

Does Tyler Posey have a Grindr account?!

In a sneak-peek preview clip for the 22-year-old’s upcoming MTV special Being Tyler Posey, the Teen Wolf star’s friends try to teach him about the straight dating app Tinder. That’s when Posey confesses he knows all about Grindr, the gay hookup app equivalent of Tinder.

“You know what Tinder is?” one friend asks Posey.

“Tinder? No, what is that? Is it like Grindr for straight people?” Posey responds. “I know what Grindr is because I have an account.”

This is a put-on, of course. But it puts the actor in a good light, in that he’s so comfortable in his sexuality that he can joke about Grindr, without disavowals or hedges.

On the man, from Wikipedia:

Tyler Garcia Posey (Born October 18, 1991) is an American actor and musician. Posey is best known for his role as Scott McCall in MTV’s show Teen Wolf.

… In February 2002 [as a young boy], he appeared in the film Collateral Damage; in December of that year, he played Jennifer Lopez’s son in the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan.

(He plays rhythm guitar and sings vocals for the band Lost in Kostko.)

Posey in lycanthropic guise:

(#4)

and shirtless, playing in the band:

(#5)

Definitely cute (and he has a very sweet smile), though not quite as model-hunky as his lycanthropic colleague Taylor Lautner of Twilight (discussed in “Lycanthropic shirtlessness”, here).

In television commercials that recently came past me: yummify (and more) in a 5-hour ENERGY commercial; and waffulicious in an IHOP commercial.

yummify etc. On this site, a commercial exhorting us to “Yummify your 5-hour ENERGY” (and prominently featuring a lumberjack, presumably because lumberjacks are really energetic). In addition to yummify and yummification, we get the playful portmanteaus yummbelievable, yummazing, and yummtastic.

A note on the product, from Wikipedia:

5-hour Energy (stylized as 5-hour ENERGY) is a flavored “energy shot” brand made by Living Essentials in Wabash, Indiana, whose parent firm is Innovation Ventures in Farmington Hills, Michigan…The company states that the product is not approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration, is vegetarian and certified Kosher, and contains no sugar or herbal stimulants. [But it has plenty of caffeine, apparently.]

Three states – Oregon, Vermont, Washington – filed lawsuits accusing 5-Hour Energy’s makers of deceptive marketing.

Now, yummify: a playful formation, yummy + -ify, giving a causative ‘ make yummy’ or ‘make more yummy’. From Urban Dictionary, from JillFit on 10/16/13:

To make a traditionally bland, plain or gross food product or item more delicious.

And on yummy, from NOAD2:

informal adj. (of food)  delicious: yummy pumpkin cakes.

• highly attractive and desirable: I scooped up this yummy young man.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from yum + -y.

Going back to yum:

informal exclam. used to express pleasure at eating, or at the prospect of eating, a particular food.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: imitative.

That is, imitative of a sound (some) people make when enjoying food.

waffulicious. At the IHOP (International House of Pancakes) site for Belgian waffles,some picked out as waffulicious waffles ‘especially tasty waffles’, with the libfix -(V)licious, extracted from portmanteaus of the form X + delicious.

A note on spelling. The intention of the commercial’s creators was clearly that the word should have four syllables, preserving the syllabic l of waffle (as schwa + /l/). So WAFFLICIOUS wouldn’t do, because that would be pronounced with three syllables. WAFFLEICIOUS would work, but the medial EI is awkward. What we want is WAFFL- plus -V-LICIOUS, for some vowel letter V: WAFFALICIOUS, WAFFELICIOUS, WAFFLILIOUS, WAFFLOLICIOUS, WAFFULICIOUS. WAFFOLICIOUS is probably a bad choice, because the O could be pronounced /o/ (rather than schwa), as in dyn-o-mite!. The creators probably went with U as representing schwa most effectively.

But then -(V)licious. Previous postings on the libfix (the first two are the most important):

AZ on Language Log 9/4/06: “-Vlicious invention”

BZ on Language Log 9/5/06: “The surreptitious history of –licious”

AZ on Language Log 3/1/07: “Get Fuzzy gets playful”

ML on Language Log 9/10/09: “Schadenfreudelicious”

AZ on Language Log 12/11/09: “Liciousness”

AZ on this blog 6/11/13: “-licious sex”, on twinkalicious and its variants

Yesterday, it was The Advocate; today, it’s another LPI publication, Out (or OUT) magazine, again with two pieces of interest for this blog in the latest (October 2014) issue: one on straightsplaining, one on gay bookstores.

Background. From Wikipedia:

LPI Media (formerly Liberation Publications Inc.) was the largest gay and lesbian publisher in the United States. The company targeted LGBT communities and published such magazines, books, and web sites, with its magazines alone having more than 8.2 million copies distributed each year. The Advocate and Out magazines were the two largest circulation LGBT magazines in the United States, each with corresponding websites; Advocate.com and OUT.com, respectively. [The magazines continue, as do the websites.]

Additional publications included Out Traveler, HIV Plus, and LGBT penned titles through Alyson Books making it the “largest publisher of gay and lesbian print publications” and thus the largest print voice of the LGBT communities

… They were also parent owners of Specialty Publications, which produces adult (pornography) publications MEN, formerly Advocate Men, FreshMen, Unzipped, and [2]. Specialty Publications was one of the largest gay adult erotica web and video production companies in the world.

… [an] agreement was completed in August 2008, with Here Media Inc. the new owner of LPI, Specialty Publications, and LPI’s book company, Alyson Publications

LPI was for a considerable time very much male-oriented. The newsmagazine The Advocate has with some success embraced a larger lgbt readership, but the style magazine (offering fashion, entertainment, and “lifestyle” features) Out is still notably male-focused; Wikipedia reports that it has

the highest circulation of any gay monthly publication in the United States. It presents itself in an editorial manner similar to Details, Esquire, and GQ [note: all with a male target audience].

Straightsplaining. On p.41 of the latest Out, a piece by R. Kurt Osenlund, “I’m so happy for you: When well-meaning sentiments are actually straightsplaining in disguise”, in which out gay man Osenlund bridles at “I’m so happy for you” from well-meaning straight people, who are apparently offering congratulations to him on having survived so far and managed some degree of success in life, despite the gross handicap of his being gay.

Osenlund sees these occasions as “straight people aiming to make sense of the gay experience through their straight lenses” — straightsplaining, in the terms of Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak in his 2/7/14 piece “A Field Guide to Straightsplaining”, who classified 12 levels of ascending toxicity in the phenomenon. (Osenlund saw “I’m so happy for you” as at the lowest level.)

Juzwiak’s intro:

If you want to know about gay people — their lives, their desires, their ideas, their cultures — listen to gay people. If you want to know about straight people, listen to straight people talking about gay people.

Straight people have a lot to say about gay people. Of course they do. Everybody talks about everybody. The growing acceptance of homosexuality/queerness means that gays have more of a voice than ever, but also that straight people have more to say about gay people than ever. That’s a recipe for a screaming match.

The term straightsplaining is modeled on mansplaining. From Wikipedia:

Mansplaining is a portmanteau of the words “man” and “explaining”, coined around 2008-09 to describe a well known social phenomenon commonly experienced by women, whereby a man who describes some topic to a woman, habitually does so in a patronizing and condescending manner, perhaps unwittingly, and often despite having limited knowledge himself, because of the gender assumption and stereotype that a woman needs matters explained much more simply or must have far less background or technical grasp and knowledge than a man would.

Mansplaining also covers a heterogeneous mix of mannerisms in which a speaker’s reduced respect for the stance of a listener, or a person being discussed, appears to have little reason behind it other than the speaker’s assumption that the listener or subject – being female – is not expected to have the same capacity to understand as a male would, or their views are not given the same respect a male’s would be given. It also covers situations where it appears a person is using their conversation primarily for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, by holding forth to a presumed less capable female listener in order to appear knowledgeable by comparison.

… The word is thought to have been first used in 2008 or 2009, shortly after San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit published an April 2008 blog post titled “Men Explain Things to Me; Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”. In it, she did not use the word mansplaining, but defined the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”.

Gay bookstores. On p. 46 of Out, “Open Books” by Colin Crummy, beginning:

British author Philip Hensher first visited Gay’s the Word, now the U.K.’s only gay bookshop, when he was an Oxford student in the 1980s.

… He … thought someone ought to write a book inspired by the shop, which, since it opened in 1979, has withstood a customs raid, storefront vandalizations, and the bottom falling out of the book market. Gay’s the Word celebrates its 35th birthday this year, and Hensher has written the very book he’s longed to read [the novel The Emperor Waltz].

(Hensher then supplies a list of “10 must-read books” — all of them fiction about the gay male experience.)

I was bowled over to read that Gay’s the Word (with its direct, in-your-face name) is the last remaining gay bookstore in the U.K. Bookstores (of all types) are, of course, disappearing everywhere, but gay bookstores (or, more generally, bookstores with some lgbt focus) are vanishing especially quickly, as lgbt people are increasingly diffused geographically, while being absorbed, gradually but unevenly, into the larger society.

Some of the fallen: Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, A Different Light (several stores in California, with the one in the Castro district of San Francisco the last to go under), Lambda Rising in D.C., the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC.

A bonus. An Out piece on Scottish actor James McAvoy (who has taken several gay roles) entitled “James F*****g McAvoy”, for his inclination to use fucking as an intensifying modifier all over the place, starting with (on p. 78):

“If you’d have told me about my career as a wee boy, I’d have been really fucking surprised”

and going on from there, including “everybody fucking else” and “a guy standing still and fucking whispering to himself” on p. 81 and on p. 82 a series: “fucking pointless”, “their fucking independence”, and “a fucking mental case”, concluding with

“If a director doesn’t want me, that’s their fucking loss.”

A fucking bravura performance.

Today’s Zippy:

  (#1)

Unicar is a portmanteau of unicycle and (subcompact) car, and Zippy’s Unicar is a hybrid of a unicycle and a minicar — so far as I know, a vehicle from Zippy’s fantasy world, not the real one.

(Bonuses: the playful coining warmification and (in the title) a pun on the real world.)

On the car in question, from Wikipedia:

The Nash Metropolitan is a car that was sold, initially, only in the United States and Canada, from 1954–62.

It conforms to two classes of vehicle: economy car and subcompact car. In today’s terminology the Metropolitan is a “subcompact”, but this category had not yet come into use when the car was made.

It turns out that there has been a Unicar on the market, a very small car with a unitary (one-piece) body. From the Microcar Museum site:

1959 Opperman Unicar (model T): Opperman, a tractor manufacturer in England saw the success of the Bond Minicar and decided to build a new Microcar for the British market.

The first model from Opperman was the Model “T” Unicar.

It looked like a larger sedan in miniature and was the cheapest car shown at the 1956 London Motor Show.

There was no front hood or rear trunk lid in the fiberglas body.

The [2-cylinder] engine was positioned in the middle of what should be the rear seat and 2 small “jump” seats are on either side of the engine “hump”.

There was no differential for the rear wheels so they were placed closer together than the front wheels, in a manner similar to the Isetta, but not as extreme.

Unfortunately since it had 4 wheels, it was subject to a higher Road Tax in Britain as compared to a 3-wheeled vehicle.

  (#2)

(The Isetta was an Italian-designed three-wheeled single-cylinder microcar built in a number of countries.)

From Chris Waigl on Facebook, this entertaining composition:

[Corrected from an earlier version, with thanks to Chris W.]

A complex portmanteau of labrador (retriever) + abracadabra (the magician’s incantation), with the first more or less wrapped around the second. And, as Chris pointed out, also a double dactyl,

S W W / S W W

John Lawler commented, “Pretty alabrate setup.”

(As with most of these compositions, I have no idea who originally created it.)

[Addendum: obviously, the dogs are not labs, but (Siberian) huskies -- probably, as Chris W. suggests to me, because of the enormous number of husky images available on the net. But the joke would be better with actual labs.]

Today’s Zippy:

A complex portmanteau in the last panel: marshmallegro has all of marshmallow and all of allegro in it (thus combining the otherwise disparate marshmallow-toasting and musical-tempo themes), but the shared material — /ælo/ — is discontinuous, first /æl/ in the middle of the portmanteau, then /o/ at the end. (The portmanteau is also prosodically pleasing: a double trochee, S W / S W, which could easily be set to music.)

And then there’s the pun in the title Mallow’s Seventh, again combining the two themes, via an allusion to composer Gustav Mahler, whose Symphony No. 7 is sometimes referred to (though not by Mahler) as Lied der Nacht (Song of the Night).

It’s been a week of complex portmanteaus: yesterday it was the doggy labradabrador (a double dactyl).

Two cartoons this morning, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) on a usage-peeve theme; and borrowed vocabulary put to slangy uses.

The Rhymes. Grammar police dog is a portmanteau of the overhapping N + N compounds grammar police and police dog. The usage point that the dog is enforcing here is the superstition called, variously, No Stranded Prepositions or Dryden’s Rule (after one of its most dogged exponents, John Dryden). A wretched idea that just will not die, despite the writings of all the responsible usage writers.

(Another recent posting on the enforcement of usage prohibitions is the grammar sheriff here, who shoots you dead for using non-standard multiple negation.)

The Bizarro. Rather more complex, involving the items juju and mojo, both with African ceremonial uses, but now adapted to slang use.

juju in Wikipedia:

Juju or Ju-Ju is a word of either West African or French origin used previously by Europeans to describe traditional West African religions. Today it refers specifically to objects, such as amulets, and spells used superstitiously as part of witchcraft in West Africa.

and in NOAD2:

a charm or fetish, esp. of a type used by some West African peoples.
● supernatural power attributed to such a charm or fetish: juju and witchcraft.

But the Online Slang Dictionary gives an extended meaning:

the “magic” of a given plant, liquid or object. It will either help or hinder health, well-being etc.; i.e. the juju can be “good” or “bad.” It is up to a shaman to know what juju to use when. Windows 1998 upgrades are full of bad Juju. [Hence there are uses to mean ‘luck’, either good or bad.]

On to mojo. From NOAD2:

a magic charm, talisman, or spell: someone must have their mojo working over at the record company.
● magic power.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: probably of African origin; compare with Gullah moco ‘witchcraft.’

You can see extended uses developing here. The Online Slang Dictionary gives a number of these, especially ‘style’ and ‘sex appeal’. (I don’t give the illustrative examples here; OSD entries are offered by users, and these rarely have examples that convey the senses of items in context at all well. After all, the contributors know what the examples mean to them.)

In today’s comics crop, a Zits on language and the sexes (once again), a Rhymes With Orange with language play, and a Bizarro metacartoon on the visual conventions of the comics:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

Love talk in Zits. #1 has Jeremy and his girfriend Sara, communicating in grossly gender-stereotyped ways: Sara highly verbal (and focused on feelings), Jeremy monosyllabic (and focused on sexual attraction). Jeremy, in fact, falls back on primitive Tarzan-talk (“Me make lousy love talk”), as does his buddy Pierce (“Join club”); they have apparently devolved.

Damnesia in Rhymes. #2 has Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With the Wind, seen here in declining old age. Rhett, in particular, can’t recall the conclusion of his famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. Amnesia for damn: so the portmanteau title “Damnesia”.

Crosshatching in Bizarro. In #3 the patient presents with something that at first glance appears to be a rash, but on closer inspection turns out to be the crosshatching used by cartoonists to convey shading or texture. Clever of the doctor to realize that he’s confronted by someone who’s not only by a patient but also a cartoon.

Two cartoons from the latest (December 2014) Funny Times (by Jen Sorenson and L.J. Kopf), plus a Eurythmics parody passed along on Facebook.

Globola. The first panel of a Sorensen cartoon, with a portmanteau (global + Ebola):

(#1)

On the cartoonist, from Wikipedia:

Jen Sorensen (born September 28, 1974, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) is an American cartoonist and illustrator who authors a weekly comic strip [Slowpoke] that often focuses on current events from a liberal perspective. Her work appears on [a variety of websites and in alternative newsweeklies].

Truth Paste. More language play, from L.J. Kopf:

(#2)

Either a pun (on tooth paste) or a portmanteau (truth + tooth paste) — these can be hard to distinguish — plus the play on sticking and paste.

It wasn’t easy finding information on the cartoonist, but eventually I found gold in a 1/6/06 story (“L.J. Kopf at Bundy”) in the Barre Montpelier (VT) Times Argus:

Waitsfield – The Bundy Center for the Arts will present “Mythical Hiccup – Cartoons and Collages by L.J. Kopf,” beginning Friday, Jan. 6 …

Growing up in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, Kopf was inundated with popular culture from comic books, television, magazines, radio, and newspapers. While studying art at Carnegie-Mellon University, ideas about painting, photography, and film were scrambled into his consciousness. Consequently, his artwork went in many directions. After college, Kopf began selling cartoons to a variety of publications.

The Vermont Vanguard Press (a news and arts weekly) began in 1978, giving Kopf a weekly forum. His EDGE cartoon appeared in every issue until the paper’s demise in 1990. In 1988 Fantagraphics Books published a best-of-EDGE collection entitled “Into Every Life a Little EDGE Must Fall.” Kopf’s drawings have also been printed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Comic News, Utne, and Funny Times. For the past 15 years Kopf has been the children’s librarian at the Richmond Library and a jazz DJ at WWPV 88.7 FM.

A committed Vermonter.

Sweet Dreams. Passed on by Ann Burlingham on Facebook, who got it from the Fifi and Dave site, this grocery store parody in cheese:

(#3)

The original words, from the Eurythmics‘ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”:

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something

this > cheese, disagree > diss a brie, travel > cheddar, the seven seas > the feta cheese, something > Stilton. The YouTube video is here.

The “Back Talk: A Conversation About Words” column (by Ralph Keyes) in the American Scholar for Autumn 2014 takes up two topics: “E pluribus unum”, on invented portmanteaus submitted by readers (one of which is a bit uncomfortable for me); and “The -ize have it”, on verbing via -ize, with an invitation to readers to submit their own inventions.

Portmanteaus. Keyes’s choices from the submissions in this category were stephood, irretextable, and:

swicky: sweaty-sticky, hot, humid weather (an alternative definition of this term can be found in the Urban Dictionary, “sweet, and yet icky”), courtesy of Colleen Richards

Ouch. Only too close to home.

On Keyes. Keyes is, among other things, a word enthusiast. From Wikipedia:

Ralph Keyes (1945 – ) is an author and lecturer who has written 16 books including Is There Life After High School? … [and] The Courage to Write

… Keyes’s books have dealt with topics in popular culture such as risk-taking, time pressure, loneliness, honesty, and human height. More recently he has turned to language: researching quotations, words, and expressions. Nice Guys Finish Seventh and The Quote Verifier explore the actual sources of familiar quotations. I Love It When You Talk Retro is about common words and phrases that are based on past events. His most recent book is Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms.

On the plus side, enthusiasts have their sheer enthusiasm going for them. On the minus side, they have little or no professional training, tend not to consult the literature in the field they write about (and might not even know about it), and depend instead on their personal reactions to the material they write about. For Keyes on verbings with -ize, these drawbacks are significant.

What he wrote (with some crucial stuff at the end bold-faced):

Using nouns as verbs has become commonplace: friend, guilt, Skype, swiftboat (to name just a few). Verbing nouns this way might seem like a modern practice, but English speakers have done it for centuries. Shakespeare excelled at the art, as when he gave us “dog them at the heels” in Richard II. Harvard linguist Steven Pinker estimates that a fifth of all our verbs were originally nouns.

The transition from noun to verb isn’t always felicitous, however, not when so much monetizing, securitizing, and collateralizing is going on in the financial sector. No verbed nouns are more annoying than tortured coinages that end in “ize.” The observation of an NPR guest that human beings have a tendency to “catastrophize” gnashizes the teeth. So do self-conscious terms such as prioritize and accessorize, to say nothing of ones like compartmentalize, disincentivize, and recontextualize that add a suffix to multisyllabic words that can’t bear the extra weight.

Think of this as verbizing, a subcategory no more modern than other kinds of verbing. After hearing a music critic refer to a pianist’s concertizing, I discovered that this verb had been around since at least 1883, when a writer referred to “pigs and geese … ‘concertizing’ horribly.” A couple of decades later, the clever owners of a car wax company gave their product a name that was pre-verbed and jingle-ready: Simonize (“Motorists wise, Simonize!”). Today, marketers eventize products and services by incorporating them into events. Annoying.

One way to arrest this trend might be to take it too far. For an American Scholar tote bag, convert a noun into a verb ending in “ize.” (New coinages only, please.) The three most annoying examples will win.

Keyes supposes that a trend towards verbizing could somehow be arrested, in this case by mockery, but impulses towards linguistic innovation are never that fragile. And Keyes proposes to judge submissions according to how annoying they are — to him, presumably, since I can’t imagine a defensible independent metric of annoyingness. But worst of all, the requirement that the coinages be new is virtually impossible to check: new to Keyes, possibly, but new, period, no way. Keyes has simply no idea how much verbizing has been going on in English, though it’s not hard to get some estimate of this amount.

For years, I collected verbizing examples for intro morphology courses I taught at Ohio State and at Stanford. This was “fortuitous collection” — examples that I just happened to notice. About ten years ago I plugged into collections being made by Beth Levin, with some input from Larry Horn. Quickly the number of examples climbed into the thousands. Periodically I’ve posted on some of these — most recently on bumpkinization, on this blog on November 4th.

Now let’s call in the professionals, in particular lexicographer Orin Hargraves, who looked at verbizing in a Language Lounge column on Visual Thesaurus on 8/1/11. From that posting:

Though it doesn’t appear in English until the late 16th century, when documentation of contact with Romance languages became increasingly available, -ize has been unstoppable since. It is now freely tacked onto words and roots of any origin — not just Greek and Latin ones, which are the languages of -ize’s pedigree. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has about 1500 -ize verbs as headwords; the OED has about 2200.

The years from 1950 to 2000 were a golden age of -izing, when hundreds of new -ize verbs appeared in English. Many were regarded with derision when they first appeared, and those that were Americanisms (many) were often sniffed at by the Brits. But these verbs are all mainstream today, used by all without scare quotes or glosses.

Representative examples: computerize, containerize, incentivize, Mirandize, prioritize, securitize, texturize, weaponize. (Note that Keyes detests — is annoyed by — incentivize, prioritize, and securitize.)

But my files also include many nonce creations: hostilize, sinisterize, disjointize, religiousize, donutize, etc.; including a large number based on proper names, whose interpretation depends crucially on the context of use (Gitmo-ize, Manhattanize, Nascarize, Walmart-ize, iPodize, WASP-ize, Keplerize (referring to a Menlo Park CA bookstore), Vermontize, (Christopher) Walkenize, etc. In the face of such facts, how could we judge that an example is “new”?

Something about Hanukkah — this year, starting at sunset on December 16th — seems to invite word play, on the name of the holiday or on the name of its signature food, the latke, or potato pancake. This year we get a cross-language portmanteau (okonomi-latke), for a cross-cultural food (a Japanese-Jewish pancake). From Sam Sifton in the New York Times cooking archives:

This hybrid of the Japanese okonomiyaki pancake and the traditional Jewish latke is from Sawako Okochi and Aaron Israel, the chefs and owners of Shalom Japan in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It works beautifully in any setting where you might ordinarily serve latkes and is a fine base for caviars of any hue.

(Recipe on the site.)

(Hat tip to Sim Aberson.)

Then on Facebook, Chuk Craig took things one step further:

[Q:] What do you call a Japanese savory pancake made by independent animated 11 year old girls?

[A:] Okonomiyazaki.

Oi, okonomiyaki + Miyazaki. On the latter, from Wikipedia:

Hayao Miyazaki (… born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese film director, animator, manga artist, illustrator, producer, and screenwriter. Through a career that has spanned six decades, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and as a maker of anime feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli, a film and animation studio. The success of Miyazaki’s films has invited comparisons with American animator Walt Disney, British animator Nick Park, and American director Steven Spielberg. He is considered one of the most popular and influential animators in cinema.

… While Miyazaki’s films have long enjoyed both commercial and critical success in Japan, he remained largely unknown to the West until Miramax Films released Princess Mononoke (1997). Princess Mononoke was the highest-grossing film in Japan until it was eclipsed by another 1997 film, Titanic

Earlier Hanukkah play on this blog:

☛ 12/18/11: Latkepalooza: a portmanteau

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/12/18/latkepalooza/

☛ 12/25/11: Jewish portmanteaus: Kenny Ellis’s “Hanu-Calypso”, from his album Hanukkah Swings

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/12/25/jewish-portmanteaus/

☛ 12/8/12: Holiday greetings: Hannukat

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/12/08/holiday-greetings/

☛ 10/23/13: Portmanteau news: #2 Thanksgivukah

http://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/10/23/portmanteau-news-2/

Come across in the December 6th Economist in a piece on jail-breaking mobile phones: “Others have done so to get rid of all the annoying craplets installed by their carrier.” The portmanteau craplet (crap + applet) was new to me, but it’s been around long enough for the magazine to print it without quotation marks — and there’s even Wikipedia coverage, in the article on pre-installed software.

Two notes: on portmanteaus and compounds; and on the specialization of meaning in craplet, which is a bit more than crap applet.

Portmanteaus and compounds. An old theme on this blog: portmanteaus and compounds are two ways of combining two words (or, more generally, two lexical items): in compounds, the parts are serially ordered; in portmanteaus, they are superimposed on one another. In each case the semantics of the whole is a combination of the semantics of the parts (by one of a large number of combinatory schemes). N + N compound crap applet, portmanteau craplet.

Semantic specialization. Compounds in general often show semantic specialization. A poodle skirt isn’t just a skirt associated with poddles, but specifically one with a (representation of a) poodle on it, and in fact, according to NOAD2, ‘a long full skirt in a solid color with a chenille poodle on it, popular in the 1950s with bobbysoxers’. Portmanteaus are often similarly specialized, and the formal tightness in the combination of the parts invites viewing the semantics holistically, with even more specialization.

Craplet has been around only about seven years, but it seems to have come into the world with more specific meaning than ‘pre-installed software’. From the Wikipedia article:

Pre-installed software (also known as bundled software or crapware) is the software already installed and licensed on a computer or smartphone bought from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

… Craplets: Often new PCs come with pre-installed software which the manufacturer was paid to include but is of dubious value to the purchaser. Such unwanted pre-installed software and advertisements are derogatorily called “craplets” (a portmanteau of crap and applet) and crapware. In January 2007, an unnamed executive spokesman for Microsoft expressed concern that the Windows Vista launch might be damaged by poorly designed, uncertified third-party applications installed by vendors — “We call them craplets.” …Walter Mossberg, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, condemned “craplets” in two columns published in April 2007, and suggested several possible strategies for removing them.

A Wrong Hands cartoon by John Atkinson, from 9/18/12:

(#1)

What happens when you take idioms literally.

Atkinson is new to this blog. His Wrong Hands website is not at all informative about him, except to say that he’s in Ottowa On.

Many of his cartoons are language based. Here’s a more recent one, from 9/19/14, with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): Moby Dick + Dick Cavett:

(#2)

Ahab and the white whale on the Dick Cavett Show.

Thanks to Victor Steinbok, I know that there’s a Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog, 2014 edition by Drew Magary here. The company is an “Upscale chain offering high-end cookware, house-label kitchen accessories & gourmet goods” (from the Stanford Shopping Center site). Magary pillories astonishingly expensive food items and kitchen supplies of dubious usefulness. Among them:

Item #66-1375781 – Open Kitchen Lapkin ($5 Each)

Copy: “Extra-wide cotton napkin.”

Drew Says: Lapkin. Got it. Gonna need a lapkin ring for these lapkins, plus lapkinlets for cocktail hour.

lapkin: a portmanteau of lap and napkin. A word of dubious utility for a generously proportioned napkin.