On the group blog The Toast on September 30th, a posting by Gretchen McCulloch, “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping”, about ship names, based on a paper in fan-guistics on the subject. McCulloch writes that there’s

an actual academic paper written about it: The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology/Orthography Interface [with link to an on-line copy] is a paper about ship names. You know, like Johnlock and Brittana and Dramione. It was published in the Journal of Onomastics by Cara DiGirolamo, a linguist and also a friend.

(Hat tip to Paul Armstrong.)

On ship name (ship for short) or shipping name on this blog, see “Shipping and the Johnlock files” from 2/27. Ship names are “relationship names”, referring to portmanteau couples, especially to pairs of fictional couples as presented in fanfic (fan fiction). JohnLock is John (Watson) + Sherlock (Holmes).

(DiGirolamo and McCulloch, like a number of other writers on the subject, use the term blend rather than portmanteau for the combinatory phenomenon.)

McCulloch notes that ship names constitute a valuable resource on portmanteau formation: they provide a huge dataset of examples, spontaneously created by ordinary people, and (as there are alternative ships for a pair of names) winnowed by usage (rather than by conscious selection and dissemination from a single source, as in names in ads).

On The Toast: on its site it says that it’s

a daily blog that publishes features on everything from literary characters that never were to female pickpockets of Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Co-edited by Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg. With sections on: feminism; humor; texts from; books.

(Mostly about tv and handsome men, rather than language.)

Caught in a re-run of the tv series Numb3rs (season 2, episode 5, “Assassin”, originally aired 10/21/05), the soap-opera-handsome hunk Jordi Vilasuso, playing Colombian Gabriel Ruiz (the target of assassination attempts in Los Angeles):

(#1)

As it turns out, Vilasuso is a soap opera veteran, and also a muscle hunk.

(In this photo, Vilasuso isn’t quite smiling with his mouth, but he’s definitely “smiling with his eyes” — appparently known as smizing in some circles. The verb smize is of course a portmanteau of smile and eyes.)

Background on the tv show, from Wikipedia:

Numbers (stylized NUMB3RS) is an American crime drama television series that ran on CBS from January 23, 2005, to March 12, 2010. The series was created by Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, and follows FBI Special Agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) and his brother [math whiz] Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) who helps Don solve crimes for the FBI.

The show focuses equally on the relationships among Don Eppes, his brother Charlie Eppes, and their father, Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch), and on the brothers’ efforts to fight crime, normally in Los Angeles. A typical episode begins with a crime, which is subsequently investigated by a team of FBI agents led by Don and mathematically modeled by Charlie, with the help of Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) and Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat). The insights provided by Charlie’s mathematics were always in some way crucial to solving the crime.

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Hirsch is the older guy, Morrow the besuited guy on the right, Krumholtz the curly-haired dude.And yes, they’re all Jewish, which helps to make them plausible as a family.

The mathematics cited on the show is real, but Charlie’s applications of it to crime-solving are mostly preposterous. The family dynamics are intriguing, however.

(Hirsch, born in 1935, played Alex Rieger on the tv comedy series Taxi; Morrow, born in 1962, played Dr. Joel Fleischman on the tv dramedy series Northern Exposure — two shows that gave me great pleasure. Krumholtz, born in 1978, is perhaps best known for playing Seth Goldstein in the Harold & Kumar movies.)

Back to Vilasuso. From Wikipedia:

Jordi Alejandro Vilasuso (… born June 15, 1981 in Miami, Florida) is a Cuban-American actor best known for originating the role of “Tony Santos” on the CBS soap opera, Guiding Light from August 2000 until August 2003.

… Vilasuso has appeared in the movies The Last Home Run, The Lost City, Heights and La Linea. He also appeared in other television programs such as 8 Simple Rules, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Numb3rs and CSI: Miami. In November 2010 he was signed on to play the contract role of Griffin Castillo on the soap opera All My Children.

And he’s a muscle hunk, happy to display his body. Here he is on the beach, looking seductive:

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xx

Another from the backlog of morning names here: back to the outrageous 70s (which we tend to think of as “the 60s”). From Wikipedia:

The Cockettes were a psychedelic theater troupe founded by Hibiscus (George Harris) in the fall of 1969. The troupe was formed out of a group of hippies, men and women, that were living together communally in Haight-Ashbury. Hibiscus came to live with them because of their preference to dressing outrageously and proposed the idea of putting their lifestyle on the stage. Their brand of theater was influenced by The Living Theater, John Vaccaro’s Play House of the Ridiculous, the films of Jack Smith and the LSD ethos of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The troupe performed all original material doing mostly musicals with original songs. The first year they parodied American musicals and sang show tunes (or original musical comedies in the same vein). They gained an underground cult following that led to mainstream exposure.

… The Cockettes were the subject of a 2002 documentary, The Cockettes.

The name is a play on the name The Rockettes (the dance company that performs at Rockefeller Center in NYC), portmanteaued with cock ‘penis’.

A set of clips from the documentary:

Today’s Rhymes, in which a scarecrow gets a medical diagnosis:

As a one-time gardener, I thrill to the word loam, and of course I’m tickled by the idea of the scarecrow’s straw stuffing composting into dark, loamy soil, but my immediate focus here is the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) in the side comment below the title.

Background: loam is a fertile soil composed of clay, sand, and humus, and composting is a method for generating humus from lawn and garden clippings, leaves, food scraps, and more. I spent years creating humus this way, humus to work into the clay soil of our garden in Columbus OH, year after year, until we did have rich, loamy soil.

Onward: Hilary Price, the artist of Rhymes, is very fond of POPs — like garden bed rest (garden bed + bed rest) above. I’m not entirely sure how bed rest (lying fallow?) would help  the unfortunate scarecrow’s malaise.

[Addendum: I have now created a Page under Linguistics Notes with an inventory of postings on POPs and related phenomena.]

Two dog (after a fashion) cartoons: one by Dale Coverly (from his Speed Bump strip), one by Phil Selby (from his blog):

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(#2)

Coverly. Cartoon #1 has a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but one that works only in pronunciation (not in print): avant-garde + guard dog, referring to what is in this case an avant-garde guard dog.

NOAD2 on avant-garde:

noun (usu. the avant-garde) new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them: works by artists of the Russian avant-garde.

adjective favoring or introducing experimental or unusual ideas: a controversial avant-garde composer.

ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting the vanguard of an army): from French, literally ‘vanguard.’ Current senses date from the early 20th cent.

(There is considerable variation in how this word is pronounced, depending on how close speakers try to get to French and how much they Anglicize the word. My own favored pronunciation is far on the Anglicization side: /ˌæ van ˈgard/, ending in /gard/ as in guard, but spelled garde.)

But in any case the dog in #1 is drawn like the stereotype of a French artist (lacking only a Gauloise), and in a gesture towards experimental art is displaying a sign that says WOOF rather than barking.

Relevant Pages on this blog:

Page for Speed Bump cartoons here

Page for POPs here

Selby. Cartoon #2 plays on the ambiguity of dog: the dog of Pavlov’s dogs, referring to the animal (the vendor is ringing a bell to attract customers to his “mouth watering!” offerings), just as Pavlov rang a bell to get his dogs to salivate); and dog as an abbreviated form of hot dog, referring to the food item (the vendor is selling hot dogs).

An earlier play on Pavlov’s dogs on this blog: “Pavlov’s Cat” of 10/11/15.

Earlier postings on Selby cartoons:

“Penguins and tuxedos” of 4/17/13, where Selby is one of five cartoonists

“Cheeses” of 1/24/15, with two Selby cartoons

I stumbled on this name (on radio station KFJC) yesterday. It caught my eye both because I’ve posted about the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria Araucana) and because I admired the portmanteau in this name of a London-based musical group, with its /tri/ overlap between monkey puzzle tree and trio — combining the characteristics of lexical overlap portmanteaus (like slanguage, where two component words overlap in phonological/orthographic content, /læŋ/ LANG) and phrasal overlap portmanteaus (or POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, where two component expressions overlap in a word, tooth). Monkey puzzle trio is part lexical, part phrasal — “lexiphrasal”, like some other examples I’ve posted about.

The musicians and their music. Monkey Puzzle Trio’s account of themselves on their website:

A slowly evolving music project featuring This Heat drummer/lynchpin Charles Hayward, Pinski Zoo and Crackle bassist Nick Doyne-Ditmas and the words, voice and textures of avant-vocalist Viv Corringham, whose music walks a tightrope between song, improvisation and sound-as-sound. “We are making new song forms based on live improvisation. Every song is created in the actual moment of performance.” [V.C]

Together they create a distinctive sound world which is exhilarating and immersive and relies fully on the sensitivity and experience of all three musicians.

Among the songs they’ve recorded is “Araucaria Araucana” on their 2010 album White World.

Background on portmanteau types, from a formal point of view, looking first at lexical portmanteaus. From a 2006 Language Log posting by Ben Zimmer:

let’s consider the structural possibilities for “blends” or “portmanteaus” — words that combine two or more forms [to yield a new word], with at least one of the forms getting shortened in the process. In “Blends, a Structural and Systemic View” (American Speech 52:1/2, Spring 1977, pp. 47-64), John Algeo discerns three main categories of lexical blending:

Blends with overlapping (and no other shortening): slanguage < slang + language, sexpert < sex + expert [AZ: overlap combos]

Blends with clipping (and no overlapping): fanzine < fan + (maga)zine, smog < sm(oke) + (f)og [AZ: clip combos]

Blends with clipping and overlapping: motel < mot(or) + (h)otel, feminazi < femin(ist) + Nazi [AZ: clip-overlap combos]

That’s lexical combination (the combining material is phonological/orthographic parts of words, and the result is another word), but there’s also phrasal combination, notably in POPs like Erin McKean’s sweet tooth fairies (the combining material is expressions, of two or more words each, and the result is another multi-word expression). And there is lexiphrasal combination, with some characteristics of both simple types.

There is a Page on POPs on this blog, with an inventory of postings on POPs, covering both the simple examples and also several lexiphrasal examples. The details vary from case to case. Here I’ve picked three for brief discussion.

Elephantom of the Opera. From a 6/12/11 posting. ELEPHANTOM on its own is a lexical combo, of the overlap type (ELEPHANT + PHANTOM), primarily orthographic (but also phonological); but Elephantom of the Opera is lexiphrasal: phantom is involved both for its orthographic/phonological makeup and for its identity as a word in the four-word title Phantom of the Opera.

Fleetwood Macchiato. From a 3/29/14 posting. in Fleetwood Macchiato, there’s a lexical (phonological) overlap, Fleetwood Mac + Macchiato, but Mac is involved both for its phonological/orthographic makeup /mæk/ MAC and for its identity as a word in the two-word name Fleetwood Mac.

Give it a triceratops / Give-it-a-Try-Ceratops. From a 9/7/2012 posting. The overlap /traj/ is involved both for its phonological makeup and for its identity as a word in the four-word idiom give it a try

And now the excellent name Monkey Puzzle Trio.

(All sorts of taboo language and sexual references.)

So I posted a brief notice of Mark Peters’s recently published bullshit lexicon, noting in passing the euphemism bullshine, which wasn’t among the many listed in the book. That has led me to a play on bullshit, the portmanteau Bullshido; through Michael Covarrubias, to the swearword malapropism bullshtein in the movie Johnny Dangerously; and through the malapropistic slur cork-soaker in that movie, to a hilarious SNL sketch “Cork Soakers”, where the expression is a comic double entendre. What a long strange trip.

Bullshido. By a route paved in accident I came across this wonderful portmanteau (of bullshit and Bushidō) in the martial arts world, in the site Bullshido: No BS MMA and Fighting Arts (MMA stands for mixed martial arts). The logo:

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On the linguistic connection to martial arts, from Wikipedia:

Bushidō, … literally meaning “the way of the warrior”, is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry.

bullshtein. Then from Michael Covarrubias on Facebook (lightly edited here):

The mention of bullshine reminds me of the movie Johnny Dangerously and the character Roman Troy Moronie (Richard Dimitri) who said “bullshtein” and messed up every other swear word he tried to say. fargin’, icehole, bastage, somanabatch, and my favorite: cork-soaker.

On the movie, from Wikipedia:

Johnny Dangerously is a 1984 American parody of 1930s’ crime/gangster movies. It was directed by Amy Heckerling; its four screenwriters included Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris.

The film stars Michael Keaton as an honest, goodhearted man who is forced to turn to a life of crime to finance his mother’s skyrocketing medical bills and to put his younger brother through law school. It also features Joe Piscopo, Marilu Henner, Maureen Stapleton, Peter Boyle, Griffin Dunne, Dom DeLuise, Danny DeVito, Dick Butkus and Alan Hale, Jr..

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In the article, Moronie is described as “a malapropist of swearwords”. Richard Dimitri as Moronie:

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Brief IMDb note on Dimitri:

Richard Dimitri was born on June 27, 1942 in New York City, New York, USA. He is known for his work on Johnny Dangerously (1984), Let It Ride (1989) and When Things Were Rotten (1975).

cork soaker. The character Moronie leads us to this excellent malapropism for cocksucker, which has also served as a deliberate comic double entendre, in the splendidly crude Saturday Night Live sketch “Cork Soakers” (season 29, episode 17, first aired 4/10/04, with guest host Janet Jackson). The full sketch can be viewed nere.

From the SNL transcript site, the cast:

Giuseppe: Horatio Sanz, Marcello: Jimmy Fallon, Female Tourist: Janet Jackson, Male Tourist: Chris Parnell, Luigi: Fred Armisen, Cork Soaker #1: Seth Meyers, Cork Soaker #2: Darrell Hammond, Monica: Maya Rudolph, Carmella: Rachel Dratch

and now some highlights. From early in the sketch:

Luigi: I love-a soaking the cork! I could-a soak the cork all night long, if they let me! I want to-a soak two corks at once!

Female Tourist: So.. are all corks the same?

Marcello: No, no, no..

Cork Soaker #1: I like-a to soak the big-a, thick-a corks!

Luigi: I like-a the long-a, skinny ones.

Cork Soaker #2: I like-a the dark-a ones.

Giuseppe: The great-a thing about the cork soaking, is that while you are-a soaking the cork, you can also.. massage-a the grapes, until the cork is ready. [holds up a bunch of grapes]

So, briefly, Sanz introduces balls as well as cocks into the sketch.

Meanwhile, Janet Jackson flubs her part every time the script calls on her to use soak cork or cork soaker, as here:

Female Tourist: [stumbling, on the verge of cracking up] So, how did you learn to sork.. corks — suck — soak corks?

Her struggles yield a second level of comedy in the sketch.

There’s also a digression into play with the sexual term 69, ostentatiously avoided here:

Giuseppe: What year was that?

Marcello: The year we soaked each other’s corks?

Giuseppe: Yes.

Marcello: That-a was, what.. that was like, sixty.. late 60’s, right?

Giuseppe: Yes.

Marcello: Sixty.. eight?

Giuseppe: I-a wanted to say.. 70.

Marcello: No.. you sure it wasn’t one earlier than that?

Giuseppe: It was sometime or other..

Marcello: Let’s just say between 68 and 70, alright?

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun:

The cronut, a hybrid food with a portmanteau name. See section 1 (on the cronut) of my 5/30/13 posting about portmanteaus.

The latest ad from the Daily Jocks company, with a caption:

  (#1)

The head-scratcher

He didn’t know
Where he was or
How he got there;
Last he remembered,
He was rocking to
“El Bimbo” at the
Blue Oyster Bar, in his
Pink and blue jockstrap,
With a really
Hot
Sweaty
Stud
Who called him
Sugar

Some notes:

Ad copy from Jocks:

Get the blood pumping with the all new Sugar Rush Collection from PUMP!
Made from quality micromesh and cotton fabric, each pair will help keep you cool while still giving you full support.
Available in jock and jogger in a funky pink and blue color combo!

Then the Blue Oyster Bar — the gay leather bar in the Police Academy films (link), where the guys dance to the song “El Bimbo” (played by Jean-Marc Dompierre and his orchestra); a Blue Oyster Bar scene can be viewed here. El Bimbo would of course refer to a male bimbo, otherwise known (by portmanteauing) as a himbo or mimbo: good-looking, buffed, focused on his grooming and his body, not very bright, and inclined to be a slut. In another variant, he’s a bimboy, as in the 2015 book Becoming the Bimboy, a male/male romance by Lance Abrusco:

  (#2)

But why Blue Oyster Bar? Well, the color blue has been associated with gay men, as in the (now-deceased) gay pornographic magazine Blueboy:

  (#3)

(plus the use of blue to refer to material with sexual or pornographic content).

Then there’s the rock band Blue Öyster Cult, but I don’t see any gay male association there, so it probably just contributed the words blue and oyster to the bar name.

As for oysters, they’ve been associated with virility since ancient times, no doubt because of the similarity in appearance of oysters and vulvas:

  (#4)

Now this is easily seen as a vulva, but it can also be seen as a (moderately complex) anus, and gay men are in any case inclined to view the male anus as a sexual organ, analogous to a vagina (with the vulva as its external part). That makes Blue Oyster a moderately subtle name for a gay bar, less blunt than, say Manhole or Tool Box.

(More common as symbolic of both vulvas and anuses are flowers, in particular roses.)

Through Facebook friends, this entertaining Mental Floss piece, “All 50 States Reimagined as Food Puns” by Rebecca OConnell:

  (#1)

If you had to assign one piece of food to represent each state, which item would you pick? For the good people at Foodiggity [which can be followed on Instagram], the answer is whatever is punniest.

Armed with a set of state-shaped cookie cutters and a love of wordplay, the team set out to make each state out of a food. The series, called The Foodnited States of America, features all 50 states.

The project came about when Foodiggity founder Chris Durso’s young son suggested they make states out of food. Durso almost dismissed the idea, until his son added, “But what if they like had funny names like New Pork or New Jerky?” Durso understood the value of a good pun and took on the task of shoving mashed potatoes into metal shapes.

Some are straightfoward puns, some are straightforward portmanteaus, many are combinations.

A few more examples:

Pork Lo Maine, Arkanslaw, Swissconsin, Quinoashington, Rocky Rhode Island, Prosciutah, Pretzelvania, North Carolima Beans, Ryeoming, Georgianzola, Avocolorado, Piedaho, Nutellaware, Tunasee, Fishigan, South Dacocoa Puffs, New Spamshire

Two more photos, from the vegetable world:

  (#2)

  (#3)

Alerted by Andy Sleeper, two recent Pearls Before Swine cartoons:

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(#2)

The Worrywarthog: a phrasal overlap portmanteau (POP): worrywart + warthog. The first is new on this blog; the second has come up in passing several times, but without an actual look at the animal.

The warthog. The skinny in brief, from Wikipedia:

The common warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) is a wild member of the pig family (Suidae) found in grassland, savanna, and woodland in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Although capable of fighting (males aggressively fight each other during mating season), the common warthog’s primary defense is to flee by means of fast sprinting. The common warthog’s main predators are humans, lions, leopards, crocodiles, wild dogs and hyenas. Cheetahs are also capable of catching warthogs of up to their own weight and raptors such as Verreaux’s eagle owls and martial eagles sometimes prey on piglets. However, if a female common warthog has any piglets, she will defend them very aggressively. On occasion, common warthogs have been observed charging and even wounding large predators. Common warthogs have also been observed allowing banded mongooses and vervet monkeys to groom them to remove ticks.

Oh yes, check out my posting of 10/16/13, with a section on the underground comic Wonder Wart-Hog (the Hog of Steel).

The worrywart. Very briefly, from NOAD2:

noun N. Amer. informal   a person who tends to dwell unduly on difficulty or troubles.

In much more detail, from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site, in a posting dated 2/14/15:

Q: From David Bagwell: At least in the deep South of the United States, somebody who worries unreasonably is called a worry-wort or worry-wart, an odd usage. I could not find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, at least with my eyes or a glass in my edition with the “Lord’s Prayer on a pinhead” font. Is it known in other parts of the world? It sounds old, and I’ll bet it goes back a long time. And is it wort or wart?

A: It’s been about a month since you asked this question, so I hope you’ve not been kept awake at night worrying about the origins and spelling of this curious expression. In case you have, I hasten to clear up the second part of your question by confirming that it’s always written wart, like the growth on the skin.

It was originally American and remains widely known there (not only in the deep South), though it has long since migrated to other parts of the world. It’s not particularly common in the UK but does turn up from time to time:

Instead of wandering about in a joyful, pregnant haze, I became an obsessive worry wart. I didn’t even dare buy baby clothes.
Daily Telegraph, 28 Apr. 2014

The origin, as so often with popular phrases, is a comic strip. In this case, it was the highly popular Out Our Way by J R Williams, which began life in 1922 and ran until 1977. In the early days it often featured a small-town family. One of the boys, aged about eight, was nicknamed Worry Wart by his elder brother. In one early frame, the boy is in bed alongside an open window, his bedclothes and face blackened with soot from nearby factory chimneys. He gets an unsympathetic reaction from his brother:

So somebody told you it was good fer you t’sleep with a winder open, hah? Well answer me this, Worry Wart, without no sarcasticism — does this somebody live in a shop neighborhood?
Out Our Way, by J R Williams, in the Canton Daily News (Canton, Ohio), 3 Apr. 1929

The phrase came into the language at around this time and became quite popular in the 1930s because Williams produced many gently humorous cartoons featuring Worry Wart.

What’s intriguing about its early history is that it didn’t mean what it does now — somebody who constantly worries about everything and anything. Instead it took its sense from the cartoon — a child who annoys everyone through being a pest or nuisance. [AZ: this sense of <em>worry</em> is closely related to the usage of the verb when we say that a dog worries a bone,] An early reference is a story from April 1930 in a Texan newspaper, the Quanah Tribune

Chief: “Elmo Dansby (the school worry wart) informed us that he was going to get him a girl and have a big time.” He doesn’t sound like a worrier.

An odd enquiry a little later in the decade (presumably a humorous squib and not a genuine question) shows the meaning well:

Dear Pat and Mike: I am a young squirt in the Sophomore class. I have many bad habits such as trying to act smart, pestering the teachers, am the biggest worry wart in school and think I am very cute. Tell me a way to overcome these bad habits. — Worry Wart.

Dear Worry Wart: When you find out what people think of you, you will automatically drop them.
Lockhart Post-Register (Texas), 8 Nov. 1934

This meaning was still the usual one when the phrase began to appear in Australia after the Second World War, but by the 1950s it was being used there in the way we do now. It took some years more for the meaning to change over completely in the US. By the time it reached us here in the UK it had only the current sense.

So where does it come from? There has long been a belief that warts are caused by worry and stress, which presumably accounts for the current meaning. And the original sense may have been provoked through the idea that warts are often an itchy nuisance. They invite one to scratch and worry at them, which only makes things worse. The idea was expressed in this falsely worry-making admonitory ditty:

Don’t worry a wart,
Or a thing of that sort,
You’re taking a terrible chance sir;
For often they grow,
As doctors all know,
Into a formidable cancer.
Sandusky Star Journal (Ohio), 26 Feb. 1923.

In today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, a mash-up of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (the folk rock group) and Young Frankenstein (the movie), in a phrasal overlap portmanteau (POP):

(#1)

It’s a Monster Mash, as in the 1962 novelty song.

The ingredients. First, CSNY. From Wikipeda:

Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN) is a folk rock supergroup made up of David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. They are known as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) when joined by occasional fourth member Neil Young. They are noted for their intricate vocal harmonies, often tumultuous interpersonal relationships, political activism, and lasting influence on US music and culture.

(#2)

Second, the film. From Wikipedia:

Young Frankenstein is a 1974 American comedy film directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder as the title character, a descendant of the infamous Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The supporting cast includes Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Richard Haydn and Gene Hackman.

The film is an affectionate parody of the classic horror film genre, in particular the various film adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein produced by Universal in the 1930s.

(#3)

A wonderfully funny movie.

“Monster Mash”. From Wikipedia:

“Monster Mash” is a 1962 novelty song and the best-known song by Bobby “Boris” Pickett. The song was released as a single on Gary S. Paxton’s Garpax Records label in August 1962 along with a full-length LP called The Original Monster Mash, which contained several other monster-themed tunes.

A video of Pickett performing “Monster Mash” (on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand) can be viewed here.

In billboards’s “The Top 10 Halloween Songs” from 10/27/14, “Monster Mash” is ranked #2, behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller:.

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange, with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

(#1)

That’s The Wrath of Khan + Hanukkah. (Hilary Price is fond of POPs.) Hanukkah began at sunset yesterday — note the one candle already lit in  the menorah — and will continue for eight days, one day for each of the eight branches of the menorah. The admonitory figure in the cartoon is the villainous Khan from Star Trek, as played by Ricardo Montalbán. By order of Khan, Spock and Kirk will get no Hanukkah gelt or other desirable presents, just socks. Oy

From Daniel MacKay on Facebook, “Happy Hanukkah from Canada”, with a wonderful moose menorah:

(#2)

On to Khan. From Wikipedia:

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a 1982 American science fiction film released by Paramount Pictures. It is the second film based on Star Trek, and is a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). The plot features Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise facing off against the genetically-engineered tyrant Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán), a character who first appeared in the 1967 Star Trek television series episode “Space Seed”.

RM as Khan, displaying his powerful pectorals:

(#3)

Here’s a much younger RM, also displaying his body:

(#4)

From Wikipedia on the actor:

Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino, (… November 25, 1920 – January 14, 2009), was a Mexican actor. His career spanned seven decades, during which he became known for many different roles. During the 1970s, he was a spokesman in automobile advertisements for Chrysler, including those in which he extolled the “soft Corinthian leather” used for the Cordoba’s interior.

As the character in this commercial, RM was widely parodied.

From 1977 to 1984, Montalbán played Mr. Roarke in the television series Fantasy Island.

… Many of his early roles were in Westerns in which he played character parts, usually as an “Indian” or as a “Latin Lover”, but he was cast against type in the film Mystery Street (1950), playing a Cape Cod police officer. From 1957 to 1959, he starred in the Broadway musical Jamaica, singing several light-hearted calypso numbers opposite Lena Horne.

During the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of only a handful of actively working Hispanic actors in Hollywood, although he portrayed several ethnicities – occasionally of Japanese background, as in with the character of Nakamura in the film Sayonara (1957), and as Tokura in the Hawaii Five-O episode “Samurai” (1968). In the 1963 comedy Love Is a Ball, he played a naive, penniless French duke being groomed as a potential husband for a rich American woman.

Mentioned is a Facebook posting that went by me a while ago, this name is a combination of super, marionette, and animation.

The official trailer for a Supermarionation documentary can be viewed on YouTube here.

From Wikipedia:

Supermarionation (a portmanteau of “super”, “marionette” and “animation”) is a puppetry technique devised in the 1960s by British production company AP Films. It was used extensively in the company’s numerous Gerry and Sylvia Anderson-produced action-adventure series [animated cartoons for television], the most famous of which was Thunderbirds. The term was coined by Gerry Anderson, possibly in imitation of “Dynamation”, Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion technique

Now I know that you’re thinking about Super Mario Bros., the video game. From Wikipedia:

Super Mario Bros. … is a 1985 platform video game internally developed by Nintendo R&D4 and published by Nintendo as a pseudo-sequel to the 1983 game Mario Bros. It was originally released in Japan for the Family Computer on September 13, 1985, and later that year for the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America and Europe on May 15, 1987, and Australia later in 1987. It is the first of the Super Mario series of games. In Super Mario Bros., the player controls Mario and in a two-player game, a second player controls Mario’s brother Luigi as he travels through the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Toadstool from the antagonist Bowser.

No connection with Supermarionation.

(Lots of gay sex stuff in here, so use your judgment.)

The most recent Daily Jocks ad:

  (#1)

BCNÜ have launched their all new Varsity collection of sports tanks and shorts!
The slick, sporty gear has been designed for the active man, with form-fitting contouring and mesh paneling for extra breathability.
Both tanks and shorts are made from polyester and elastane fabric and come in 3 color styles so you can match up your complete workout look!

The ad inspired me to write a fantasy short story, in the form of (relatively) long-line free verse.

Bradley Chase and Charlie Nash
Fled their home towns at 19 to
Seek a life of gay porn in
San Francisco.

Both were solidly gay, loved sex with
Other men, loved displaying themselves
Theatrically, both had gorgeous bodies –
Part a gift of nature, part
Hard work at the gym – both
Enthusiastic, inventively dirty, fiercely
Energetic, versatile, and

Mostly oblivious to the indignities of
The business, surmounting the need to maintain endless
Hard-ons, meeting the challenge of being paired with
Strangers to perform a long menu of
Sex acts, no choice of their own, even
Coming to wryly enjoy douching their manholes.

They kept their initials, performing as
B.C. and C.N. and under the cheesy
Porn names Baloney Cumming and
Cocky Naked. They fell in love, thinking
No one else could appreciate them
The way they appreciated each other. They
Parlayed their porn fame into steady
Incomes as rentboys and giving live
Sex shows. They were married at
SexHawk Studios in S.F. in June 2008.

They left SexHawk a few years later to form
Their own portmanteau production company, BCN,
Churning out outrageous in-your-face flicks, starting with
Faggot Sluts, that also managed to be both
Funny and romantic.

Then they discovered BCNÜ and
Took it on as their company brand: their
Actors would disport themselves in
Prominently labeled BCNÜ gym gear, until their
Engorged cocks and balls burst out of the
Skimpy (but eminently comfortable) garments and
The boys ripped them off each other’s bodies and
Went at it like crazed minks —

A sturdy formula that earned them a small
Fortune, though they still hustled for money,
Just for the pleasure of giving their johns
What they needed.

Notes:

The referential ambiguity in the last line — does they refer to the johns or to B.C. and C.N.? — is intentional.

As far as I can tell, Baloney Cumming and Cocky Naked have not been used as names by any gay porn actors.

There’s also no gay porn SexHawk Studios (meant to suggest Falcon Studios), but sexhawk has been used as a name in several contexts, most notably as the name of a “Minnesota sleaze rock” band (link here). A thumbnail:

(#2)

Nicely sleazy album title — plus a crude crotch grab.

I don’t think Faggot Sluts has been used as the name of a gay porn flick, but  the expression faggot slut is so widely used that I could be wrong. Bonus here: a new posting on AZBlogX, “The pleasure of humiliation”, with a thoroughly X-rated BDSM image with the caption “Two faggot sluts being led by their worthless dicks”.

Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

(Don Piraro says there’s just one of his secret symbols in this cartoon: the eyeball. For an explanation, see this Page.)

In any case: Victoria’s Secret (the women’s underwear stores) + secret agent (or maybe Secret Agent, the Joseph Conrad novel or any number of films and tv shows with that name).

That’s for testicular photograph portmanteau, in a portmanteau.

The Steam Room Stories episode (very fit guys, gay and straight, clad only in a towel, in a steam room, talking about their bodies and about sex) of December 31st featured two of the steam room guys sitting side by side on the bench. I paraphrase their exchange:

Right asks Left how his vacation was. Fantastic, Left says, bragging that he took some great photographs. Left whips out his cellphone, pages through photos of gorgeous landscapes for Right, who admits that Left is a really good photographer, adding, however, that Left’s camera seems to be defective, because there are dark round blobs at the top of all the photos. Nothing wrong, dude, Left replies, those are my balls, don’t you know about nutscapes? Right is astonished, appalled. Left stands up, bends over, and shows how he snaps his testicles:

  (#1)

Right is even more appalled; of course he says that Left is nuts.

The actual “Nutscapes” SRS episode can be viewed here.

That’s nuts + landscape, with a play on Netscape folded in.

A nutscape, one of many you can find on the net, with an especially hairy testicle:

  (#2)

From Details magazine in November, “WTF: Men Are Taking Pictures of Their Balls in Beautiful Landscapes: Nutscapes are a new trend that involves pretty vistas and testicles” by Max Berlinger:

Ever thought that the beauty of God’s green earth in all [its] unfettered glory was somehow missing something? That a verdant pastoral field or the gloriously undulating rock formations of a millennia-old canyon needed the addition of something more corporeal? Well, you’re not alone in your desire to add a decidedly human touch to nature’s stunning vistas and breathtaking expanses. As the website Nutscapes so . . . interestingly . . . demonstrates, sometimes Mother Nature’s most majestic views can be improved upon by just a small glimpse of testicle.

This is where you ask yourself: Huh?

No, we’re not kidding. The site’s entire existence is to promote the “trend” — if you can call it that . . . yet — of bending over, dropping trou, and capturing a lovely landscape with just a hint of hairy sack hovering at the top of the frame. Juvenile? Sure. And yet there’s something both disgusting and strangely hypnotizing about the endless array of variations featured on the site. From just a little sliver of the ol’ family jewels floating above a coastal scene to a more eye-catching hint of hanging ‘nad perched above a snowy mountain setting, it’s a reminder that (a) nature’s bounty is endless and (b) one’s body is, in fact, a wonderland [John Mayer song “Your Body Is A Wonderland”].

Notice that Berlinger pretty much runs through the relevant vocabulary: testicles, nuts, balls, family jewels, (go)nads, sack. Journalists are fond of avoiding the use of one term again and again by constantly varying their vocabulary, piling on synonyms, especially in edgy semantic domains,

(Side note: In unearthing this piece, I found the sad news that Condé Nast has closed Details down, and at the same time has significantly cut back the staff at GQ.)

Just when you thought that the ship of bromanteaus and other brocabulary (involving the (North American) slang term bro ‘brother, buddy’, used especially as an address term) had long ago sailed into oblivion, Geico comes along with a recent ad campaign that erupts with goofy brocabulary.

It’s the “gym commercial” for Geico insurance, showing two buddies working out with weights at a gym (one of them bulking up considerably in the process). For fans of shirtlessness, here’s a still from the commercial:

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube here.

It starts with Guy 1 (the guy in the still) saying to  Guy 2, “Check this out, bro”, and Guy 2 responding, “What’s that, broheim?” (using another address term meaning ‘brother, buddy’, conventionally spelled broheim but pronounced /bròhím/ in the commercial; more on the word in a little while). And then they go back and forth about the virtues of Geico insurance, each turn introducing another piece of brocabulary:

brofessor, brotato chip, brotein shake, Teddy Broosevelt

(with accented bro replacing the first syllable in the words professor, potato, protein, and Roosevelt — all syllables that are already phonetically close to [bro]).

But that’s not the end of it: the commercial (made by the Martin Agency) appears under a number of titles:

Brocabulary, Brorritos, Bromosapien, Bronoculars, Brobot, Brozone Layer

(with more initial replacements by accented bro),

Edgar Allan Bro, Vincent Van Bro

(with replacement of the last element of a name), and

Avbrocado, Guacbromole

(with replacement of a medial element). All very goofily playful.

The item broheim. Grant Barrett on the Way With Words site on 6/9/06:

broheim n. brother; friend, buddy. Also broham, brougham, or (rarely) broheem. Editorial Note: This term was recently popularized by the movie A History of Violence. Etymological Note: The Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary (2004, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California) says that the brougham variation derives from the Cadillac Brougham, a high-end sedan; however, there is no substantiation for this and it is highly unlikely.

Other speculations on its origin. Some commenters on Grant’s posting see it as as bro plus a Germanic element seen in German Heim ‘home’.  The association of the item with Black English vernacular makes this origin story (as well as the sedan-car story) relatively unlikely. Then there were commenters who knew it in an (American) Jewish context, and took it to be from a Yiddish ritual greeting, ultimately deriving from Hebrew. In general, people were reporting information about the context in which they were first aware of it, not at all the same thing as tracing the word back to its source

Grant was unimpressed with these stories, observing again and again that working out the origins  was not a particularly useful enterprise; the real question is about who uses the word, in what contexts, and for what purposes, now, and finding the original meaning (something that’s extraordinarily hard to do for many slang expressions) tells us absolutely nothing about that.

The word bro itself certainly began life as a clipping of brother, almost surely in AAVE (African American vernacular English), but it long ago escaped into much more general use.

Brocabulary. I started posting on brocabulary on this blog on 12/27/08, in “Manecdotes and brobituaries”, reporting on a book entitled Brocabulary, which was full of invented bromanteaus and related portmanteau words. The first browords to achieve widespread use seem to have been the noun bromance and its related adjective bromantic, referring to an intense (but non-sexual) relationship between straight men. Suceeding postings:

8/23/11, “Isn’t it bromantic?” (link): a cartoon with the adjective bromantic

8/26/11, “Bromantic lexicography” (link):  bromance added to a dictionary

9/20/11, “Dubious bromanteau” (link): brony = bro + pony (as in My Little Pony)

3/22/12, “man-bro-guy-” (link): brosiery = bro + hosiery

3/25/12, “On the bro- watch” (link): brogrammer (and the bronus brotein)

3/27/12, “more bro” (link): more bromanteaus: broga (bro + yoga), brogrammer again

10/4/14, “Bromantics: Pine and Quinto, Kirk and Spock” (link)

3/8/15. “Bromancing the Bone” (link): non-sexual bromance; sexual brolovers

12/12/15, “Sex between straight men: bro-jobs” (link): and other brocabulary; bro-choice campaign (involving pro-choice bros)

Stumbled upon this while looking for more examples of Bizarro cartoons with Batman in them:

That’s a thoroughly perverse counterpart of Batman, an anti-Batman, so to speak: a parallel to the character Bizarro, who’s the anti-Superman.

(Yes, Batzarro is a portmanteau of Batman and Bizarro. Just as Batzarro the character combines characteristics of Batman with the evil of Bizarro.)

From Wikipedia

Batzarro (Wayne Bruce) is a supervillain in the DC Comics Universe. He is a twisted doppelgänger of Batman, in the same vein as Bizarro, the similar doppelgänger to Superman. While a Bizarro version of Batman had first appeared in pre-Crisis continuity in World’s Finest Comics #156 (March 1966), his first appearance in post-Crisis continuity occurred in Superman/Batman #20 (June 2005), which was written by Jeph Loeb.

His origin is unknown, but his speech patterns are almost identical to those of Bizarro [e.g., we am = we are + I am]. Just as Bizarro has a reversed “S” on his chest, Batzarro has Batman’s bat-logo on his chest, but it is upside-down. He also wears a utility belt like Batman’s. However, he wears it upside-down as well with the pockets open. He calls himself the “World’s Worst Detective.” He uses a large steel chain as a weapon and as a grappling hook, but no other items. He seems to lack eyes [that is, he’s blind as a bat] and has yellow fangs. He was also said to have, opposed to Batman’s origin, shot and killed his parents. Batzarro has a tendency to think aloud, often repeating what has just been stated in his thought boxes, the opposite of Batman’s custom of quiet contemplation.

From Mike McKinley this morning, news of the Jocktion Maketplace (website here). The name Jocktion is a portmanteau of jock ‘athlete’ and auction; the company’s enthusiastic pitch:

Welcome to Jocktion! We’re an online marketplace where the hottest guys sell the highest quality [used sports] gear. Register today to view our sales, check out our models, and participate in our Forums. Interested in selling your own gear? Apply today to earn top dollar on your merchandise. We’re constantly making improvements to our site and new items are being added, so be sure to check back often!

(Sellers pay a fee to list their wares; buyers get in free.)

The company is exploiting what you might call “contact magic”, the idea that clothes (and other artifacts) gain a kind of power from their association with specific people — usually famous people, in this case athletes. Some people will pay money to own a piece of clothing that had been worn by a celebrity. And some men will pay money to own a piece of sports gear that had been worn by a jock; its power lies in the strong masculine associations of men’s athletics.

Two thumbnails of (purported) models for the firm looking tough in their gear:

(#1)

Kickboxer displaying his muscular body.

(#2)

Football player displaying as much of his muscular body as he can in his shoulder pads, and in compensation doing a cock tease for the viewer.

Well, yes, this stuff is aimed clearly at potential buyers who are gay men, men who are widely supposed to be virility-obsessed; the listings seem to focus heavily on high-masculinity sports like soccer, rugby, lacrosse, and (American) football (and less on tennis, gymnastics, running, cycling, or swimming and diving); they focus on men’s underwear, more masculine in connotation than, say, shirts or sweatbands; they emphasize masculinity further by often stressing that the gear was actually worn in a game, suggesting that it might still be suffused with male sweat. (Nothing in the company’s materials says that the gear has been washed or otherwise cleaned.) And, even further, the models frequently stipulate that they are straight, playing on the widespread belief that straight guys are more masculine (and hence more desirable) than gay guys.

A listing that pretty much has it all, for a guy described as a “straight soccer jock”, offering a

Shock Doctor jock strap – game used

(not just any piece of sports gear, but in fact that most masculine of men’s gear, the jock strap, and, even better, actually used in a game).

The company’s terms of use specify that Jocktion is only a venue, merely connecting buyers and sellers, and not involved in transactions, so they can’t control the quality, authenticity, or legality of items listed for sale; but they provide a feedback mechanism for buys and sellers to rate one another after a transaction.

The items on auction could well be soiled beyond sweat from play in a game; that’s between seller and buyer.

On a less fastidiously framed website, naughtybids.com, the range of sellers is larger than purported athletes, taking in other types, like young men in general, tough working-class men (like cops), country boys, big-dicked good-looking men, even those well-known icons of masculinity, the Swedes: listings for

straight country boy’s Fruit of the Loom white briefs, used cop’s underwear, college boy boxers, hung blond Adonis (selling various items), boxer worn by straight 19 year old from Sweden

Some of the listings offer sweaty underwear and a few offer more heavily soiled items, with cumstains and skidmarks. It’s all between seller and buyer, remember.