A cartoon by David Cohen for the season:

A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): ice cube + cubicle. Brr.

David Cohen is an editorial cartoonist for the Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times.

Today’s Zippy, with poignant seasonal nostalgia (Christmas Day snow on nearly deserted streets) along with the usual budget of Zippy oddness (imagined aliens from Neptune, Macadamia nuts, and Perry Mason):

  (#1)

The title — Snowtopia — is a wintry portmanteau, of snow and Utopia.

Turns out that the portmanteau has been used in quite a different context, as the name of a variety of the flower bacopa (sometimes named Sutera cordata, now properly Chaenostoma cordatum),

the flower-happy trailing plant that blooms profusely in spring and fall and even intermittently through summer. It thrives in sun or shade, seems untroubled by pests and diseases, and has tireless bloom strength.

  (#2)

The photo is of the variety Snowtopia. The ad copy is from Park Seed Co., announcing that the reliable (and most commonly white) bacopa was now available as seeds. (Other companies made similar announcements.) I posted on the plant (with a photo of the variety Snowstorm) on this blog on 6/17/13.

For lovers of portmanteaus, several companies also offer seeds of the blue variety Blutopia.

Wednesday’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau/pun:

(Film) noir and narwhal.

Film noir has come up on this blog several times, in connection with Zippy cartoons about the genre, in particular:

“Possessed by film noir” of 8/16/12
“Don’t Bother to Knock” of 8/9/13
“Noir 1949″ of 6/14/14
“Dingburg noir” of 1/6/15

And on the narwhal, from Wikipedia:

The narwhal, or narwhale (Monodon monoceros), is a medium-sized toothed whale and possesses a large “tusk” from a protruding canine tooth. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. It is one of two living species of whale in the Monodontidae family, along with the beluga whale. The narwhal males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk, which is an elongated upper left canine.

The grisly origin of narwhal, from NOAD2:

mid 17th cent.: from Dutch narwal, Danish narhval, based on Old Norse nár ‘corpse,’ with reference to skin color.

Yesterday it was the noirwhal; today on Rhymes With Orange, it’s the French pastry revolution:

A complex tissue of puns, portmanteaus, and cultural allusions.

Start with the title: French pastry + the French Revolution. Then the themes of the cartoon are (simultaneously) baking and the French Revolution.

Baking: the characters are doughboys; dough rises; baguette in the pun on Antoinette; a slicer for bread.

The French Revolution: rose up ‘revolted'; Marie Antoinette; slicer ‘guillotine’.

Briefly noted: in the short story “I Can See Right Through You” by Kelly Link in McSweeeney’s No. 48 (2014), on p. 81:

Meggie says, “She’s a nice kid. Makes Whore-igami in her spare time and sells it on eBay.”

“She makes what?” the demon lover says.

“Whore-igami. Origami porn tableaux. Custom-order stuff.”

“Of course,” the demon lover says. “Big money in that.”

(Other occurrences as a joke about paper-folding prostitutes, on various sites. As far as I can tell, there are as yet no commercial products.)

A pun on origami, or a portmanteau of whore and origami, or of course both.

A recent ad for Daedalus books, spotted in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine, and no doubt in other bookish publications:

The libfix -tastic, extracted from fantastic, has here been whittled down a bit further to -astic and tacked onto daedalus. (daedalustastic would have been possible, but daedalusastic is shorter and neater.)

On the company, from Wikipedia:

Daedalus Books is an independent seller of books, music, and video founded in 1980. While it also sells new titles, Daedalus Books’ specialty is the remaindered book. Its philosophy is to keep bestsellers, classics, and overlooked gems available to the reading public.

Background on the libfix, starting with a 1/21/05 posting by Ben Zimmer on ADS-L:

Grant Barrett has a new DTWW [Double-Tongued Word Wrestler] entry for the suffix “-tacular”. Grant found cites for nominal forms back to 1958 (“spook-tacular”), but adjectival forms (e.g., “craptacular”) only date to the mid-’90s.

I’d guess that the “X-tacular” adjectives were modeled on “X-tastic”, which became a productive formation for US advertisers in the ’60s… a quick scan of Newspaperarchive shows “shoe-tastic” (1966), “carpet-tastic” (1966), “fang-tastic” (1968), “shag-tastic” (1969), “swim-tastic” (1970), etc. (During the NFL players’ strike of 1987, David Letterman had a Top Ten list called “Top 10 Slogans of the Scab NFL”– the number one slogan was, “It’s scab-tastic!”).

But the granddaddy of them all is the obvious blend [i.e., portmanteau] “fun-tastic”:

1939 Los Angeles Times 27 Apr. 13/7 In-a-word description of the Ritz zanies: Fun-tastic.

1942 Nevada State Journal 27 Oct. 4/4 Fantastic and fun-tastic; manna for theater-goers who want “something different.”

1942 Nevada State Journal 17 Nov. 4/4 Fun-tastic nonsense guaranteed to tickle your sense of humor.

All three examples come from Jimmie Fidler’s syndicated column, “Fidler in Hollywood”.

On this blog, in a 12/27/08 posting (with the relevant items boldfaced here:

The appearance of dicktionary in the 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).

And in a 6/21/11 posting:

Awesometastic looks like awesome with the libfix -tastic (though most of the -tastic examples have a noun as first element: carpet-tastic, scab-tastic, dicktastic, etc.). But then playful word formation is, well, inventive.

And then, caught this morning on a Law & Order: SVU rerun:

She’s bangtastic! [from bang ‘fuck, screw’]

(Here the base is probably a verb, but could be a noun, and in this case the first element conveys sexual content and not just enthusiasm.)

Bangtastic gets an Urban Dictionary entry, and there’s even a Bang-tastic Worldwide Adult Directory, of female escorts.

Of course, there’s also a fucktastic, which appears to have both sexual uses, like bangtastic, and merely enthusiastic uses, like dicktastic and cocktastic: roughly ‘fucking fantastic’.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Cross-species hybrid, portmanteau to do along with it. The model here is the names for mixed-breed dogs: -poo- mixes, of poodle plus something else (yorki(e)poo for poodle + yorkie) in a 1/29/12 posting, canine portmanteaus more generally (labradoodle, cockapoo) in a 1/31/14 posting.

Today’s One Big Happy:

Ruthie confuses decaffeinated and decapitated, which I would have thought was an unlikely glitch, since both are relatively rare words (though phonologically very similar) — but maybe with decapitations in the news recently, the second word was more salient for her (how much current news do 6-year-olds get?).

And then she creates a portmanteau, decapinated, of the two words.

This morning’s name (which just popped into my head; I’m pretty sure I’d never seen or heard it before) was the playful Elrond Hubbard, which has been adopted by a fair number of people on the net — for instance, a fictional character with a Facebook account:

Elrond Hubbard is a renowned science fiction author and prophet. His mother was an elf and his father was an alien from a master race. He claims the face on Mars is of his father.

And in a Twitter account for @Elrond_Hubbard:

By truly believing in Scientology, you too can be an immortal Elf.

The sources: Elrond and L. Ron Hubbard.

Elrond in Wikipedia:

Elrond Half-elven is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium. He is introduced in The Hobbit, and plays a supporting role in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Elrond was Lord of Rivendell, one of the mighty rulers of old that remained in Middle-earth in its Third Age.

(#1)
(Hugo Weaving as Elrond in Rivendell, in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies.)

Hubbard in Wikipedia:

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard … and often referred to by his initials, LRH, was an American author and the founder of the Church of Scientology. After establishing a career as a writer, becoming best known for his science fiction and fantasy stories, he developed a self-help system called Dianetics which was first expounded in book form in May 1950. He subsequently developed his ideas into a wide-ranging set of doctrines and rituals as part of a new religious movement that he called Scientology.
(#2)

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:

Presumably Hilary Price’s intention was that the spelling FRAUG, pronounced [frɔ:ɡ], should represent a combination of FROG — pronounced [frɑ:ɡ] or [frɔ:ɡ], depending on your variety of American English — and FRAUD, pronounced [frɔ:d] for many American speakers, but [frɑ:d] for American speakers who level [ɔ:] and [ɑ:] in favor of the latter (the “COT-CAUGHT merger”: both these words are pronounced [kɑ:t], DAWN and DON are both [dɑ:n], and SHAW and SHAH are both [ʃɑ:]).

[Addendum: an earlier posting on frog and fraud has a Discover Card commercial that plays on a confusion between the two.]

My current favorite gay porn title of the outrageous pun variety: Romancing the Stone > Bromancing the Bone. We start with the portmanteau noun bromance. From Wikipedia:

A bromance is a close, emotionally-intense, non-sexual bond between two (or more) men. It is an exceptionally tight affectional, homosocial male bonding relationship that exceeds that of usual friendship

This can then be verbed and (separately) sexualized, to refer to what are sometimes called brolovers (there’s a brolovers site on tumblr, which has sexy images, many with a definitely romantic cast to them, as below).

That gets us to bromancing. Then the object bone, slang for an (erect) penis, which echoes the stone of the title Romancing the Stone and throws in some alliteration as well.

The various “bromancing the bone” sites are all over the map. Some are about batebuds, buddies in masturbation — either jacking off together or jacking each other off. Some are about buddies in fellatio. Some are about buddies in anal intercourse; the commercial gay porn Bromancing the Bone DVDs seem to be “amateur” anally oriented videos; amateur videos feature non-professional actors presented as straight guys having sex with one another — not a genre I’m at all fond of.

In yesterday’s NYT, the story “During Bakery Break-In, Only Recipes Are Taken” by Carol Pogash, about the cruffin situation in San Francisco:

San Francisco — It takes three days to make a cruffin, a muffin-croissant hybrid that is the signature of Ry Stephen, a 28-year-old pastry chef. His shop, Mr Holmes Bakehouse, has been open three months and inspired a wild following, with customers lining up early to buy the ice-cream-cone-shaped cruffins, which reliably sell out before the line is gone.

“It creates its own frenzy,” said Rebecca Flint Marx, editor of San Francisco Magazine’s food section, who noted that not only are cruffins a cult item — and at $4.50, relatively affordable — but they are also camera-ready, as photos on Instagram attest. Fillings include caramel, strawberry milkshake or Fluffernutter cream (among other flavors), depending on Mr. Stephen’s mood.

Now, the tempting sweet may have inspired a crime. Overnight last week, a thief stole the recipe for cruffins, and Mr. Stephen’s 230 other recipes, from binders in the bakery’s kitchen. Nothing else in the store was touched: not money, valuable baking equipment, an iPad or other computers. And while Mr. Stephen has copies of the recipes on his office computer, and the store opened almost on time the next morning, he was understandably upset.

In a food-crazy city where every consumer is a Yelp critic, the theft of the recipes — which the police are investigating — inflamed the demand for cruffins, the West Coast’s answer to New York’s cronut. (Both have croissant bases but are shaped differently, and a cronut is fried while a cruffin is baked).

A couple of postings (of many) here on foodmanteaus like cruffin: “Foodmanteaus” of 6/10/13 and “Hybrid dishes and foodmanteaus” of 7/15/14.

As Easter approaches (April 5th this year), Peeps naturally come to mind (substantial posting on Peeps here). Peeps are endlessly versatile; here’s Grace Kang on Serious Eats, taking Peeps to Japan, in the form of Peepshi (Peeps sushi):

(Hat tip to Beth Linker.)

Yes, they’re appalling. But cute.

Today’s POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) — student loan shark (student loan + loan shark) — from the April 13th New Yorker:

Shanahan on this blog: 7/15/12 (2 cartoons), 2/1/15 (3 cartoons).

A Liam Francis Walsh cartoon in the latest (April 20th) New Yorker:

(#1)

A mashup — a kind of portmanteau — of two movies: the 1951 film adaptation of Tennessee Wiliams’s dramatic play A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski (and Kim Hunter as his wife Stella); and the 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski, with Jeff Bridges as The Dude. The scene setting (with Dude Stanley at the bottom of an ornate stairway, calling up to Stella) shows Stanley from Streetcar; but Dude Stanley looks, dresses, and talks like The Dude.

(Liam Walsh earlier on this blog: on 3/1/14 on “Constraining communication”.)

Kowalski. From Wikipedia:

Stanley Kowalski is a fictional character in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stanley lives in the working-class Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans with his wife, Stella (née Dubois), and is employed as a factory parts salesman. He was an Army engineer in World War II, having served as a Master Sergeant. He has a vicious temper, and fights often with his wife, leading to instances of domestic violence.

Here’s Brando in the film, in the “Hey, Stella!” staircase scene:

Lebowski. Kowalski is not at all the man in #1. The appearance and attitude belong to The Dude:

(#2)

A posting of mine on 12/21/12 characterizes the Dudeism in The Big Lebowski, with a quote from Wikipedia:

Dudeism advocates and encourages the practice of “going with the flow”, “being cool headed”, and “taking it easy” in the face of life’s difficulties, believing that this is the only way to live in harmony with our inner nature and the challenges of interacting with other people.

In the April 20th New Yorker, a fascinating story of a lost, and eventually found, Tlingit totem pole, in the Our Far-Flung Correspondents category: “The Tallest Trophy: A movie star made off with an Alaskan totem pole. Would it ever return home?” by Paige Williams.

In the midst of this, a portmanteau, Barrymoreabelia, combining Barrymore [John Barrymore, the actor in question] and memorabilia: ‘Barrymore memorabilia’. I suspect that the element -abelia has been “liberated” as an affix of its own — a libfix — but this is very hard to test, given the existence of a plant, the flowering shrub abelia (which I’d been meaning to post about, but this isn’t the occasion).

Some background from Williams’s piece:

Southeastern Alaska contains hundreds of islands cut by a vast network of channels and fjords. The biggest island, Prince of Wales, had the most totem poles, and the village with the greatest number was [the Tlingit village] Tuxecan. In 1916, a researcher counted a hundred and twenty-five poles there, and described them as strikingly elaborate and diverse in their imagery.

… One particularly regal pole loomed over the southeastern corner of a large house on the beach. Nearly thirty feet tall, it had three crests. The topmost figure was a bird with folded wings. Below it was a human, which held a large finned sea creature at the base of its tail. The bottom crest was a fierce, furry animal — a bear or a wolf — sitting high on its haunches. One day, in the nineteen-thirties, the totem pole went missing. All that remained was a sawed stump.

A photo of the pole:

Caption: John Barrymore, left, joked that “tribal gods” might “wreak vengeance on the thief.”

Partway through the story comes this quote from John Blyth Barrymore:]

My grandfather was quite a collector. Upon my grandmother’s death in March of 1979, my father, John Barrymore, and I began to enjoy a greatly improved standard of living supported by selling off the Barrymoreabelia we had pirated from her estate

followed by this comment from Williams:

The totem pole survived the Barrymoreabelia diaspora, at least temporarily.

Two occurrences of Barrymoreabilia, first from John Blyth Barrymore, then echoed by Williams.

Michael Quinion’s affixes site has one related entry, for –ana, discussed in a posting of mine from 1/17/11. More exactly, -(i)ana ‘things associated with a person, place, or field of interest’ (as in Shakespeariana). But the site has no entry (at the moment) for –abilia or –bilia.

Today’s Bizarro, with a portmanteau:

Dinosaur + Connoisseur. With some entertaining play on the style of wine writing.

Two things came together. One, in response to a query from a reader, I’ve been struggling to compile some sort of list of my terminological innovations, only to discover that a fair number of these seem to have been invented independently by others. Two, a friend wrote (to me, as a card-carrying linguist) to ask for credit for her invention of thirstrated, a portmanteau of thirsty and frustrated (parallel to hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry) — only to be disappointed when I told her that Urban Dictionary already had an entry for thirstrated in this sense, though I reassured her that independent innovations happen all the time.

One example from my own struggles: on phallicity ‘use of phallic symbols’, which I introduced in a posting of 8/23/10, but saying:

I’m far from the first to use the word, as you can see by doing some googling. It has its uses in certain lit-crit circles, and was used in the mocking re-titling “Phallicity of the Ruling Classes” by Helen Dewitt (on her paperpools blog, here) of the poem “Why Are We Naked Again II” by Mithridates (on his Night Hauling blog, here).

Of course, I found these uses after I’d invented the word myself.

Two points here. First, it’s foolish to insist that to use a term, you have to discover who was the first to use it and then give that person credit — especially when the term is a natural innovation, which could easily be invented over and over again independently.

Second, it’s also foolish to insist that to use a term, you have to find out whether some alternative term hasn’t already been invented, as if the earliest invented term had priority over all other possibilities. See my discussion of Ben Zimmer’s innovation of obscenicon (and my use of it), in the posting “The obscenicons vs. the grawlixes” of 8/1/10.

On my Facebook feed a few days ago, a posting that was incomprehensible because it lacked context that the poster clearly assumed. I asked about this, and friends explained that this was a form of vaguebooking (nice portmanteau). Urban Dictionary entries suggest that vaguebooking can have several sources: in particular, it could be a posting that was intended to be part of a private exchange but got sent to some people not part of the exchange (as, it turned out, in this case), or it could be a deliberate (passive-aggressive) scheme to get people to comment. A third possibility: it could be from someone who posts the equivalent of brief diary entries, assuming (inconsiderately) that readers will be following the thread in detail:

Turns out that there’s also fauxbooking, fakebooking, and who knows how many other Facebook portmanteaus.

Sexy Friday continues, with the war between the sexes in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

First, misogynoids launched against the women, then misandroids launched in retaliation, sowing the boner-destroying deathsterone.

The first two portmanteaus build on android ‘(in science fiction) a robot with a human appearance’ (NOAD2): misogyny + android, misandry + android. Then we get deathsterone, death + testosterone. And then there’s boner, bone +-er, here in sense 2 from NOAD2:

1 N. Amer. informal a stupid mistake.

2 N. Amer. vulgar slang an erection of the penis.

Sense 2 is a straightforward metaphor: an erect penis is hard like a bone. For sense 1, compare boneheaded ‘stupid’ (another metaphor: with a head (hard) like bone).

A note from cartoonist Jon Rosenberg:

Keep your boners safe, people. Keep them under your mattress while you sleep.