Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

It’s been a while since we had a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but here’s a cute one (Hilary Price is fond of them): prairie dog + dog walker = prairie dog walker, which is what the fellow in the cartoon is — definitely a niche occupation, not much in demand.

Today is that odd holiday, U.S. Daylight Saving Day (DST officially began about an hour ago, when 2 a.m magically became 3 a.m.). Tomorrow, the 14th, is a somewhat more substantial, but still odd, holiday, Pi Day (it’s 3.14), which one local restaurant celebrates by selling all kinds of pies. That’s followed on the 15th by the Ides of March (Don’t go, Julie, don’t go!), also the Penis Festival in Japan (a celebration of generative power), then on the 17th by St. Patrick’s Day (this year’s news: “Mayor de Blasio [of NYC] to Attend St. Patrick’s Day Parade [the largest in the world] After Gay Ban Falls”).

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This was just a week ago, which can be a long time in political life. In the NYT Magazine on March 6th, on p. 15, in the piece “Inside Out” by Mark Leibovich:

I was traveling with [Marco] Rubio in Nevada on the eve of that state’s Republican caucuses last month… Rubio seemed almost giddy about the “Marcomentum” he was feeling.

A political portmanteau, coined in a giddy hopeful moment. Rubio has now fallen to third in the Republican primary field and has been written off by many commentators, even as his home state Florida’s primary comes on Tuesday — the 15th, also the Ides of March, which is possibly ominous (Marco Julio, knifed by the Brute Cruz?).

I had vowed no more U.S. primary season postings, but Rubio’s portmanteau Marcomentum got to me. Forgive me.

From my King Features feed today, two cartoons of linguistic interest: a Mother Goose and Grimm with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) and a Zippy that happens to use a playful verb with, it turns out, a long history:

(#1)

(#2)

POP goes the mattress. #1 crunches together short-term memory and memory foam mattress, using the shared memory, to get an expression that combines  their meanings: a memory foam mattress that has short-term memory problems. (This blog has a Page on POPs, here.)

The verb transmogrify. This is entirely incidental to the (absurd and surreal) plot of the cartoon, but the text has this verb (“I thought he’d never transmogrify!, said of the Head of God), which is itself playful, even silly. You might expect that such a verb would be a relatively recent innovation — that with time such a verb would have its humor wear off, wear out, would lose its  somewhat silly edge. But no. From NOAD2:

verb transmogrify [with obj.] chiefly humorous   transform, especially in a surprising or magical manner: the cucumbers that were ultimately transmogrified into pickles. ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: of unknown origin.

Probably a deliberate invention, concocted out of words and word parts — ogre might be in the mix — to get a ponderous and silly-sounding alternative to the neutral verb transform. An alternative that’s been with us, still sounding silly, for over three and a half centuries.

From Tim Stewart on ADS-L, a posting linking to a 1/25/13 report on a project on his Dictionary of Christianese site (“The casual slang of the Christian church… authoritatively defined”), on “blended denominations”:

The church that the Simpsons attend is “The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism.” Presbylutherans are a product of Matt Groenig’s imagination, as far as I know. But fundagelicals, evangecostals, and presbycostals are totally not make-believe.

Those Christians really exist. Along with bapticostals, baptigelicals, cathodoxes, evangecostals, fundevangecostals, methobapterians, pentebaptists, baptimethocostals, and other tongue-twisters. I’ve catalogued at least 31 of these “blended” denomination names so far, one for every flavor in the Baskin-Robbins display case.

… Now these denomination names don’t, in the strictest sense, represent bonafide denominations. For the most part, these blended denominations are descriptive labels that people use to indicate a mixture of influences. Suppose you grew up Baptist and have since gone Pentecostal.  You’ve got roots in both traditions, and so you might refer to yourself as a Bapticostal. Or maybe you attended evangelical churches for years before you switched into the emerging/emergent church stream. Bingo: evangemergent.

Stewart gives a number of entries in his emerging dictionary of “blended denominations” (with blend serving as a synonym for what I prefer to call portmanteau, to distinguish these deliberate inventions from the fairly common inadvertent errors). So: Christomanteaus.

Posted recently on Facebook, this visual mashup of Gustav Klimt (Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907) and Clint Eastwood (as the Man With No Name):

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Note the name, a kind of portmanteau of Klimt and Clint Eastwood.

lvcyd is graphic artist Lucie Alexandra Delgado.

More Eastwood than Klimt, but both are in there. It’s just one of a number combining Klimt and Eastwood. Here’s another,  a t-shirt design by Frederick Jay, with more Klimt in it:

(#2)

Ok, the Klimt original:

(#3)

And a screenshot of the Man With No Name in action:

(#4)

Wikipedia on Klimt:

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d’art. Klimt’s primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.

Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he developed a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his “golden phase,” many of which include gold leaf. Klimt’s work was an important influence on his younger contemporary Egon Schiele.

And Wikipedia on Eastwood:

Clint Eastwood (born Clinton Eastwood, Jr.; May 31, 1930) is an American actor, film director, producer, musician, and political figure. He rose to international fame with his role as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the 1960s, and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.

Eastwood has made a truly enormous number of movies, as actor, both actor and director, and just director. Meanwhile, in addition to projecting hard masculinity in film, he’s performed in real life, having had (so far) two wives and four female partners, and fathering (philoprogenitivity alert!) seven children with five of these women (all except Sondra Locke).

In the midst of all this he worked in two years (1986-88) as mayor of Carmel CA.

Bonus. One of my favorite films, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot:

(#5)

Brief Wikipedia overview:

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a 1974 American crime film written and directed by Michael Cimino and starring Clint Eastwood [as Thunderbolt], Jeff Bridges [as Lightfoot], George Kennedy, and Geoffrey Lewis.

It’s a complex heist film, with lots of comic touches, and also a tragic bromance film between Thunderbolt (darker, older, tougher) and Lightfoot (lighter, younger, sweeter).

Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook points us to a new piece on Serious Eats, “Peepshi: The Next Generation” by Niki Achitoff-Gray on 3/21/16, the latest of the Peepshi (Peeps + sushi] postings there (on an earlier one, see my 3/23/15 posting “Peeps time in Japan”):

(Hurry! Only two days until Easter!)

Spring is officially here, which means the birds are a-singin’, the bees are a-buzzin’, and everywhere you look, there are signs of new life. What better time to buy a crap-ton of delicious, squishy Peeps and murder them one by one?

See, we at Serious Eats await each Easter with bated breath, eagerly anticipating our moment of glory: the systematic torture of the pastel army of Peeps that flood our supermarkets and pharmacies come March. We’ve baked them into bread, skewered them on Ring Pops, melted them onto pizza, and deep-fried the little suckers. But there’s one activity we like most of all, and it just so happens to also be the cutest, kid-friendliest form of Peep massacre we’ve ever practiced. Say hello to Peepshi: inspired by the solemn Japanese art of sushi-making, but fueled by some Lisa Frank levels of Technicolor craftsmanship [Frank markets “artwork [featuring] rainbow and neon colors and stylized depictions of animals, including dolphins, pandas, and unicorns” on school supplies and the like, aimed at young girls (Wikipedia link)]. Plus, you know, decapitation.

Instructions on the site.

Reported on ADS-L yesterday by Garson O’Toole, a posting “A word for calling out sexism” by Ben Silverman on the Socialist Worker website on 11/12/13:

In a recent and excellent exchange between Laurie Penny and Richard Seymour on the case of Russell Brand, I was pleased to see them use the word “brocialist” in their discussion. Pleased in part because, at least to the best of my knowledge, I’m the first person to ever use the word.

Brocialist came about some two years ago in one of my many arguments on Reddit forums, a noted Internet hive of sexism and misogyny. The word “manarchist” was becoming popular as a means to describe and call out the prevalence of sexists within the anarchist community, and I felt that there was a need for an equivalent epithet for the socialist movement. So “brocialist” and “brocialism” was what I came up with.

This is “bad”, negative bro, with misogynist connotations, as opposed to “good”, positive bro, connoting male bonding. The two uses are, however, closely tied, and often manifest themselves together, as in the slogan “Bros Before Hos”, which affirms masculine solidarity while nastily putting women down as whores.

On to Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26 (2008), and in particular its chapter 3: ““Bros Before Hos”: The Guy Code”, which notes that fhe basic rules of masculinity – “the boy code” and “the guy code” – have scarcely changed at all for many decades; the first rule is that “masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine” (p. 45).

And the central precept of the first rule is No Sissy Stuff!: avoid anything that might suggest homosexuality. The most wounding insult to a young man is to call him a fag(got), and “That’s so gay” is a powerful put-down among adolescent boys.

But beyond that: avoid women as friends rather than sexual conquests; avoid “feminine” interests (like the arts), avoid empathetic rather than competitive interactions (men improve one another, make one another into better men, by challenging each other agonistically), etc.

Also avoid “Mama values” (at the risk of becoming a “Mama’s boy”): cleanness, neatness, respectfulness, “proper grammar”, no “dirty talk”, etc. – including these values as policed by female partners (standing in for Mama), who are seen as “ball-busters” or “castrating bitches” when they perform this role: women as emasculating.

From p. 47 of the Kimmel book:

One of the more startling things I found when I researched the history of the idea of masculinity in America for a previous book [Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1st ed. 1995)] was that men subscribe to these ideals not because they want to impress women, let alone any inner drive or desire to test themselves against some abstract standards. They do it because they want to be positively evaluated by other men. … Masculinity is largely a “homosocial” experience: performed for, and judged by, other men.

Men in groups tend to bond through aggressive displays, and to see women as a threat to their bonds, a combination of factors that can lead to extraordinary hostility towards women, as in the 2014 Gamergate controversy, treated on this blog in a 10/26/14 posting, “doxxing”:

It seems that some traditional gamers, who are heavily male and into fiercely aggressive games, see critiques of their world by women, and the development of other types of games (especially by women), as a threat to this world and have responded with an appalling stream of misogyny directed at individual women. This bad behavior is encouraged by the ease with which people can post anonymously or pseudonomously and otherwise behave in socially irresponsible ways on the net.

And in a different social world, we get manarchists and brocialists.

The Rhymes With Orange from a few days ago:

Hilary Price is fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus), and here’s another: distracted driving + driving a hard bargain. The customer is distracted from his bargaining by messages on his cellphone.

Today’s Zippy takes us to Groton CT:

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Our Pinhead is holed up in Norm’s Diner in Groton:

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A classic diner, with (apparently) a loyal clintele. It closed for a while in 2008, then re-opened under new owners, Brenda and Mark Trask (Brenda is a long-time waitress).

On Groton, from Wikipedia:

Groton … is a town located on the Thames River in New London County, Connecticut, United States…

Groton is the home of the Electric Boat Corporation, which is the major contractor for submarine work for the United States Navy. The Naval Submarine Base New London is located in Groton, and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is also a major employer. The Avery Point section of Groton is home to a regional campus of the University of Connecticut.

… Groton was established in 1705, when it separated from New London, Connecticut. [New London was first settled in 1646, later become a significant whaling port]

The map, with New London, Groton, and nearby Mystic, all famously hiftoric, all famously tied to the water:

(#3)

Also in Groton is Groton School, one-fifth of the fictional St. Grottlesex. From Wikipedia:

The term Saint Grottlesex refers to several American prep boarding schools in New England. These schools have historically sent their graduates to the nation’s most prestigious universities…

The schools are: St. Mark’s School. St. Paul’s School, St. George’s School, Groton School, Middlesex School. The term is a portmanteau of the St. part of St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and St. George’s, then part of Groton, an extra t, and then ended with Middlesex. The St. Grottlesex schools were founded in the nineteenth century for well-to-do Episcopal Church boys (excepting nondenominational Middlesex, founded in 1901), and were consciously styled as the American equivalent of famous English public schools. In contrast, the Academies, notably Andover, Exeter, Milton, and Deerfield, were generally founded in the late eighteenth century as places to “combine scholarship with more than a little Puritan hellfire” and, originally, were often the first educational step in preparing men for the Puritan ministry. The St. Grottlesex schools retain an aura of preppy establishment.

The story of the address term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.

Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.

A brief review of these matters on this blog, then two recent entries in the conversation. And a cartoon too!

from 3/25/12, “On the bro- watch”: reference to bro as a “frat-house moniker”; brogrammers as asserting aggressive masculinity (with aggressive misogyny as a concomitant; boys’ clubs become boys-only clubs, even when physical displays of masculinity are not at issue [as in the case of programming])

from 3/27/12, “more bro”: broga – yoga for men: “Another chapter in the great book of protecting men from the taint of femininity”

from 4/12/16, “On the brocabulary watch: brocialist”: “bad”, negative bro, with misogynist connotations, as opposed to “good”, positive bro, connoting male bonding.

And now a recent Facebook comment from Aric Olnes, on the last of these postings:

In skiing, bad bros are called BroBrahs, but Michael [Thomas, Aric’s husband] likes to turn it around to BraBro for more impact. The most common utterance from BroBrahs on the slopes is a casual “Sorry, dude” shortly after they cut you off causing you to fall down.

The alternative – BraBro – plays on the emasculating nature of visualizing a guy in a bra.

And then from Brian Kane on Facebook, a reference to a douchbro (a transparently derisive portmanteau of douchebag and bro), which led me to the character Douche Bag in an ALT. cartoon by Dennis Caron, the “Gay Taste” strip of 4/17/13 with  (recurring) characters Cadence and Douche Bro:

From Caron’s website:

Denis Caron is the creator of Corvink, an art centered brand revolving around his art, comics, and designs. He was born on April 10th 1985, in Van Nuys, California and graduated with a degree in Psychology in 2007 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

… L.A.W.L.S. (sometimes written LAWLS) is an acronym for “Large Air Whales Like Silence,” the title of the webcomic created by Denis Caron in 2010. L.A.W.L.S. started as a single comic, intending to be a Gag-a-Day, with a very loose story. Eventually, however, it became a rather complex and more investing story which no longer allowed Denis to write random jokes about other things that interested him. As a result, L.A.W.L.S. was split … into 3 individual parts: L.A.W.L.S. [Story Mode], the original storyline; ALT., a spin off about the main characters in regular day scenarios: dating, playing video games, getting coffee, etc; and Words of Interest, a comic about leaning fancy words.

This week’s excellent potmanteau: Armachillo clothing from Duluth Trading Co.: ARMADILLO (for its tough protective scales) + CHILL (for cooling ability), with CHILL put iside ARMADILLO (ARMA – DILL – O), replacing the rhyming DILL. Pretty much immediately understandable, and entertaining as well:

  (#1)

(Note the graphic highlighting of the CHILL inside ARMADILLO.)

The company on this website, in “The revolution in men’s underwear” of 11/28/15, about premium brands and luxury brands, plus:

A different marketing strategy. While most menswear has moved in the direction of style, fashion, and sexiness, one firm, the Duluth Trading Company, has gone for a marketing strategy that elaborately pushes working-class masculinity, with pants (that is, trousers) claimed to be super-durable (even a grizzly bear couldn’t take them on), and the like.

In addition to the working-class persona the company adopts, it’s also very playful, as in its tv commercials for the Armachillo products. You can watch commercials for men’s shirts here and for men’s underwear here. There are clothes for women as well; this site shows what Armachillowear is available. The stills for things like the “men’s Armachillo cooling short boxer briefs” —

  (#2)

— have seriously stuffed pouches.

Finally, a note on sandwich portmanteaus like Armachillo. From my 4/11/12 posting “Sandwich portmanteaus: lepicdary”:

In a sandwich portmanteau, one contributor is put inside the other, replacing some medial material in the second: L – EPIC – DARY has EPIC inserted within L – EGEN – DARY, replacing the EGEN of LEGENDARY.

LEPICDARY is a dubious portmanteau at best, not at all easy to understand right off the bat. ARMACHILLO, on the other hand, is portmangold.

Two Monday comics on linguistic topics: a Calvin and Hobbes with an unfortunate ambiguity (pitch the tent), and a Zits with a portmanteau for a combo sport (dodgebowl):

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(#2)

Pitch the tent. The etymological source for the verb has a cluster of meanings in the domain ‘thrust, throw’: note the current senses in pitch a baseball and pitch an idea to the boss, and these two from NOAD2:

2 [with obj.] throw or fling roughly or casually: he crumpled the page up and pitched it into the fireplace. [with a further extension in slang: throw away, discard]

5 [with obj.] set up and fix in a definite position: we pitched camp for the night.

These are the senses in #1: the scoutmaster intended sense 5, Calvin understood it as sense 2, possibly because extended sense 2 is quite general, applying to a wide range of direct objects, while sense 5 has much tighter collocational restrictions: you can pitch a tent, or pitch camp, and that’s pretty much it (these are simply listed as idioms in many dictionaries).

Bonus on pitch tent. There’s a (metaphorical) sexual sense ‘have an erection that shows through covering, esp. while lying down so that the sheet above you stands up like a tentpole’. From a (wildly hyperbolic) site with fictional athletes to appeal to female readers:

Ladies meet Vincent QB#1 Panty Dropper Delgado: Every teen movie has the hot QB-ONE who balls hard day and night. That character was invented by Vince’s life. He has that smile that makes the bros nod and hoes wet. He is a 9 time All American. He’s been married four times and been through divorce twice. He owns 3 houses on every continent. He benches 275 lbs when he’s cutting and runs a 3.6 sec 40 yard dash with a weight vest underwater with a single breath. He has a childhood video of him dunking a basket ball the first time he ever tried (which was the second time he ever jumped when he was 8). The first girlfriend he ever had was a married Victoria Secret model. When the model’s husband found out, he divorced the model without giving a reason. The next week he tried proposing to Vince.

Here are some pictures of Vince that are just definitive proof that he is number one. He is a whole package for anyone who likes a BIG package. No homo. Just mad respect.

Look ladies he is outdoorsy. He can go camping and hike and pitch a tent for you and carry your back pack and make fires and shit.

Vincent pitching a tent:

(#3)

And a further bonus, Vince shirtless:

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Dodgebowl. That’s dodgeball + bowling, a portmanteau name for a combination sport/game (or double-sport, as some sites have it), apparently involving dodging bowling balls. Definitely a sport for the hardy.

Not surprisingly, there’s a (moderately snarky) BuzzFeed site (from 12/11/13) “10 Combination Sports You Need To Try Today”. It’s a mixed bag:

bicycle jousting, unicycle hockey, korfball [netball (Swedish ringboll) + basketball; Dutch korf ‘basket’], chess boxing, polocrosse, Segway polo, disc golf [frisbee golf], gravy wrestling, lawn mower racing, basketball derby [“there are no rules”]

Most of these are N + N compounds, and these mix cases where sports / games / pasttimes are combined (chess boxing, bicycle jousting, disc golf), with cases (unicycle hockey, Segway polo, lawn mower racing) where sports are played with non-standard equipment (plus gravy wrestling, involving wrestling in gravy, which I suppose you could consider a sport with non-standard equipment). There’s one entirely clear case of a portmanteau naming a combined sport: polocrosse (polo + lacrosse). Plus the Zits dodgebowl.

It turns out that there is a moderately popular phys-ed class team sport in the U.S. (grades 3 to 7, roughly) known as dodge-bowl or dodgebowl — but it involves foam bowling balls, not real, heavy, ones, as in Zits.

Some men go on the down-low, but Zippy goes on the Hi-Lo. Yesterday’s strip is set in the diner of this name in Minneapolis MN:

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Seen here in a recent photo:

(#2)

Taken up later: grilling and quilting. First, about the Hi-Lo, from a Minneapolis Eater piece “Seven Things to Know About the Hi-Lo Diner, Now Open” by Joy Summers on 3/28/16:

Longfellow’s [southeastern Minneapolis neighborhood] hotly anticipated beacon of a bygone era opened at 6:30 a.m. this morning.

1. A nod to the Bell.

The meticulously restored diner car has been restored as much as possible to its original glory, but sadly a few pieces didn’t quite make it. For one, the booths used to sport their own jukeboxes and sadly, they couldn’t saved. Nor could the old cigarette machine that stood guard by the front door. However, one bit of history from the other restaurant involved in this site did remain. The back part of the diner, the kitchen, used to be a Taco Bell. It’s already difficult to remember what this spot used to look like, but one thing did remain: there are a couple of chairs from Taco Bell that somehow fit seamlessly into the dining room…

2. A Silo is a sandwich.

The menu delivers exactly what you’d expect from a diner: pancakes, meatloaf, pie and more. The Silos (sandwich + Hi-Lo) are bread that’s been hollowed out and stuffed with sandwich stuff. It’s like a bread bowl, but for meats and cheeses. There’s a pastrami Silo with Swiss cheese and Russian dressed slaw, a Rachel and a ham and cheese.

3. Two words for the fry fiends:

Krinkle cuts. And one more: frickles (deep fried pickles for the uninitiated.)

4. Not-your-grandpa’s grasshopper.

Ryan Barott’s bar list draws on nostalgic drinks mostly from the 50’s and 60’s. There’s a Rusty Nail, Harvey Wallbanger, Grasshopper and a Cosmo (because, why not?) …

5. A Hi-Top is not a doughnut.

For one, there is no hole. Mostly, the dough is a special breed all its own. It’s yeasty and a little dense: more like the unholy love child of brioche and fry bread. Hi-Tops are either stuffed or topped with items like fried chicken, maple-bourbon syrup, gravy and micro arugula (The Gary Coop-er) or a simple Berry Gibsonia [reference to Gibsonia PA] topped with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Priced in the $10 range, each is fried-to-order.

6. Outdor seating is on the way.
7. Late night eats.

Notes:

On #1: The Hi-Lo is a 1957 Fodero diner originally from Gibsonia PA (north of Pittsburgh), moved from Cleveland to Minneapolis.

Diners are very much an American thing, characteristic of the urban Middle Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey), originating in the Northeast, then spread further afield. They’re symbols of American individualism (almost all are single-site operations, or at most, in small local chains) and egalitarianism (inexpensive food, open all day, no reservations, no dress code, often late operating hours). They have characteristic archtecture, both outside (railway car design, stainless steel, typically in Art Deco style) and inside (counter service and booths, formica, quilted surfaces), and characteristic menu offerings, heavy on grilled food and breakfast items, lots of coffee, and pie.

On Fodero diners, from Wikipedia:

The Fodero Dining Car Company (1933–1981) was a diner manufacturer located in Newark and later Bloomfield, NJ. It was founded by Italian immigrant Joseph Fodero, who formed the company after constructing diners with P. J. Tierney Sons and Kullman Industries.

Fodero diners are known for their stainless steel exteriors and art deco appearance.

On #2 and #3: note the portmanteaus Silo (sandwich + Hi-Lo, with a play on silo ‘structure for storing harvested crops’) and frickle (fried + pickle).

On #4: diners don’t typically have bars, but the Hi-Lo is large enough to serve as both a classic diner and also a classic bar and grill (both of which are into grilling). From the Oxford Dictionaries site:

bar and grill: originally [early 20th century] and chiefly US: A bar serving simple grilled meals, which may be eaten at the bar counter; a combined bar and grill-room; an informal restaurant serving simple meals. In early use especially in a hotel or club.

From NOAD2 on grill:

a grill: a metal framework used for cooking food over an open fire; a gridiron

to grill: to cook using a grill

a grill: restaurant serving grilled food

So, as Zippy suggests: let’s go get grilled!

On #5: high-tops (or hi-tops) are a type of athletic sneakers, typically worn by basketball players. The Hi-Lo food name echoes the diner’s name and suggests (correctly) that the menu item is piled high with toppings. A Gary Coop-er (or Coop’er), with a name playing on the actor’s name and (chicken) coop):

(#3)

Meanwhile, Hi-Tops is the name of a San Francisco gay bar offering fast food and drinks plus tvs tuned to sports in a setting with gym decor.  The name makes the sports connection, but also plays on the sexual sense of the noun top (versus bottom), in a forest of such play:

(#4)

Like Thurber, Sendak, Briggs, and some others I’ve written about, another cartoonist / illustrator not generally accounted to be a Real Artist (perhaps at best a “graphic artist” like Bechdel) — especially since his work is funny, and meant to be. But he was a delight, the clear standout in the specialized field of cartoonists / illustrators / humorists who focus on the world of music. The occasion is my unearthing my copy of The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (originally published in 1955, reprinted in 1984), with its enormously enjoyable combination of hilarious exaggerated drawings of symphony musicians at work and preposterous invented instruments. A third vein of humor comes in some other books of his, especially Musical Chairs of 1958, with its hybrid concoctions of animal plus instrument (a cat playing on its whiskers as a violin, for example).

Seven examples follow. I had to exercise severe forbearance to keep from swamping you with Hoffnungiana.

First, a note on the man, from Wikipedia:

Gerard Hoffnung (22 March 1925 – 28 September 1959 [note his early death]) was an artist and musician, best known for his humorous works.

Raised in Germany, Hoffnung was brought to London as a boy, to escape the Nazis. Over the next two decades in England, he became known as a cartoonist, tuba player, impresario, broadcaster and public speaker.

After training at two art colleges, Hoffnung taught for a few years, and then turned to drawing, on the staff of English and American publications, and later as a freelance. He published a series of cartoons on musical themes, and illustrated the works of novelists and poets.

In 1956 Hoffnung mounted the first of his “Hoffnung Festivals” in London, at which classical music was spoofed for comic effect, with contributions from many eminent musicians.

… In addition to his public persona as an eccentric and wit, Hoffnung had a deeply serious and moral side. He joined the Quakers in 1955 and was active in their prisoner visiting scheme. According to a biographical sketch by Joel Marks, first published in Essays in Arts and Sciences (… 1992), “Hoffnung’s outlook on race relations, homosexuality, nuclear disarmament, the treatment of animals (especially hunting) and, for that matter, the music of Bartók and Schoenberg [was] liberal and impassioned.”

Instr(u)animals. I’ll start with the instrument + animal hybrids: a hippiano (or pianotamus); some catercordions (or accordirpillars)’ and a trio of turtledrums (like turtledoves, but louder and more percussive, or maybe they’re called drumurtles:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

Two actual instrumentalists. First, a trombonist, who’s found a way to protect his hearing from the blare of his instrument:

(#4)

Then the zither, played by a cartoon musician who’s clearly Orson Welles’s Harry Lime from The Third Man (cue Anton Karas on the zither):

(#5)

Two invented instruments. From a number in the book. First, an instrument that is belongs to both the string and brass sections of the orchestra:

(#6)

And then an decidedly dangerous instrument that’s a cross between a wind instrument and a python (a pythoon, m

(#7)

Pretty much everything in the book has been folded into a delightful animation by Halas & Batchelor, which you can view here.

And you can listen here to a hilarious performance from the first Hoffnung Festival:

[Franz] Reizenstein contributed the Concerto Popolare (“A Piano Concerto to end all Piano Concertos”) to Gerard Hoffnung’s first music festival in 1956. Hoffnung’s festivals were comedy events, trading on the musical knowledge of the audience. The premise of the Concerto Popolare is that the orchestra believes it is playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, but the pianist believes he or she is playing the Grieg Piano Concerto. A pitched musical battle ensues, dragging in other themes (notably from Rhapsody in Blue, the Warsaw Concerto and the music-hall song “Roll Out the Barrel”).

American readers will of course be reminded of the 40+ years of Peter Schickele’s P.D.Q. (or PDQ) Bach, whose history begins essentially at the point where the Hoffnung Festivals ended (Schickele’s humorous concerts began in 1959). Both Hoffnung and Schickele are accomplished musicians (Schickele is a bassoonist) with a deep and broad knowledge of music history that informs their musical humor, plus a strain of wild playfulness (Schickele cites the raucous Spike Jones lampoons of popular music in the 1940s and 50s as a significant influence).

(I thought I’d already posted about Schickele on this blog, but apparently not, so this is a topic for the future.)

A note on the Halas & Batchelor studio: it started doing commercial animation in 1940 and then branched out. There’s a 2010 book Halas & Batchelor Cartoons: An Animated History that sounds great, though I haven’t seen it:

(#8)

In the June 2016 issue of Funny Times, a bit of language play, portmanteauing Oreos (referring to the brand of creme-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches) and areolas (referring to the rings of pigmented skin surrounding nipples):

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The artist, Jeff Hobbs, is new to this blog; he’s given to plays on words, however.

From his website:

When I’m not working my full time “job” you can find me cartooning, watching mixed martial arts, playing guitar, playing husband to my wife, Lisa & playing daddy to my kids, Lucas and Maci, in Elizabeth, Indiana.

My cartoons appear regularly in the Funny Times newspaper: http://funnytimes.com/

Three more from his pen:

(#2)

Not waterboarding, but torturing a gingerbread man with milk in a way analogous to waterboarding.

(#3)

One of the Egyptian Pyramids converted to a metaphorical usage, the FGP (the Food Group Pyramid).

(#4)

Kebabs on a grill, with the skewers treated like the bars in foosball (aka table football):

(#5)

So FoosKebab is a portmanteau of Foosball and Kebab.

In the July 2016 Funny Times, this punning cartoon by Australian cartoonist Judy Horacek:

Layered portmanteaus: frenemy (friend + enemy) + anemone. Frenemy from NOAD2: ‘a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry’.

(Apparently the cartoon appeared first in The Age (Victoria NSW) on 9/29/14, but I wasn’t able to view it there because it seems that that would have required my subscribing to the paper.)

Horacek earlier on this blog: on 7/1/14, with a cartoon and a brief bio.

And language play — complex puns — involving the word anemone earlier on this blog: on 7/1/14, with

a Mother Goose and Grimm: “a case of mistaken anemone”

a paper by Elizabeth Zwicky  and me, with “With fronds like these, who needs anemones?”

an example from a collection of puns: “With friends like these, who needs enemas?”

More things to play with: anonymy, anomaly, anemometer, ammonia, ammonite, mnemonic, Mennonite, etc.

Annals of lexical confusions and innovations. Two word problems from Ruthie in the cartoon One Big Happy (two recent strips), a word confusion and two innovations from the tv show Psych.

Ruthie faces clone. As so often, Ruthie is confronted with a word that is unfamiliar to her — in this case, clone — and takes it to be a phonologically similar word that she is familiar with: cologne:

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Ruthie faces irregular. And sometimes Ruthie stumbles over an ambiguity, in this case in irregular: ‘occurring at uneven or varying rates or intervals’, in this case with reference to bowel movements (what Ruthie hears) vs. ‘not even or balanced in shape or arrangement’, in this case with reference to clothes, denoting  small defects in stitching or in sizing (what a tv commercial intends):

(#2)

Shawn and Jules argue over omelet and umlaut.  In an episode of Psych, the psychic Shawn Spencer comes up with umlaut as a food name (a classical malapropism), while Jules (the character Juliet ‘Jules’ O’Hara, played by Maggie Lawson) corrects him with omelet.

Shawn verbs nutshell. In other episodes, Shawn uses nutshell as a verb meaning ‘to put into a nutshell, to summarize succinctly’. Not a usage original with him — you can find a number of occurrences of nutshell it for you on the net — but definitely a useful innovation.

Shawn portmanteaus male nanny. In yet another episode, Shawn goes undercover as a nanny — a male nanny, which Shawn refers to as a manny. More entertaining than useful, but (again) reasonably well attested elsewhere on the net.

On the occasion of my posting a Bob Eckstein (“bob”) cartoon (#1 in 6/22/16, “Two tests in cartoon understanding”), the cartoonist has friended me on Facebook (earlier Eckstein from 5/30/15, “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”). So now a few more of his cartoons, of several different types.

First: bob is fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus). One that tickles me:

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To understand this, you need to know the component expressions — free-range beef and Beefeater — and their referents, and so to recognize that the cartoon shows Beefeaters foraging freely on a farm, a wonderfully absurd idea.

Two, a wordless cartoon that requires you to recognize two things: the Rubik’s Cube (and how you deal with it) and the cartoon meme of the seeker after the knowledge of a seer — scaling a mountainside to seek englightenment (and perfection) from the master:

(#2)

The seeker is a Rubik’s Cube in its jumbled state, as you would get it in a store. But the master (sitting in the lotus position) is a perfect, solved cube.

Third and last, another cartoon that requires two recognitions: that the characters in it are space aliens, as conventionally represented:

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and that they are engaged in that odd American custom, the spelling bee (a contest whose existence depends on the many eccentricities of English spelling):

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Passed on by Facebook friends (especially Arthur Prokosch), this Dan Wasserman editorial cartoon in the Boston Globe on the 16th:

Here we are in Portmantexia, a land of words in –exit, –leave, and –out, a land that people want to abandon. The leading family in Portmantexia is the Exits, especially the recently prominent Brexit, towering above cousins Grexit, Crexit, the infant Trexit, the black sheep Texit, and the newborns Nexit and Frexit.

The names are all portmanteaus: Brexit = Britain / British + exit  (exit of Britain from the European Union), Grexit = Greece / Greek +  exit (exit of Greece from the Euro zone), Crexit = crisis + exit (rescue from, getting out of, crisis), Trexit above = Trump + exit (exit from the U.S. on account of Donald Trump (there are other senses), Texit = Texas + exit (exit of Texas from the U.S.), Nexit = Netherlands + exit (exit of the Netherlands from the E.U.), Frexit = France + exit (exit of France from the E.U.).

Note: I’m not claiming that this is a complete list of portmanteaus in -exit; it’s just a sampling. Nor do I know anything of significance about the history of any of these terms.

On the cartoonist. From Wikipedia:

Dan Wasserman is an American political cartoonist for The Boston Globe. Wasserman joined the Globe in 1985. He is syndicated in 40 papers in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and is the author of two books, We’ve Been Framed and Paper Cuts. Wasserman has a BA from Swarthmore College and studied at The Art Students League of New York.

On the title of this posting. An allusion to a famous example of zeugma:

Miss Bolo… went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair. (Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 35)

The political story and some more vocabulary of leaving. A Reuters story yesterday, “Nexit, Frexit or Italeave? British vote fires up EU’s ‘Outers'” by Dominic Evans and Marton Dunai:

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union fired up populist eurosceptic parties across the continent on Friday, giving fresh voice to their calls to leave the bloc or its euro currency.

Right-wing and anti-immigrant parties in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and France demanded referendums on membership of the union, while Italy’s 5-Star movement said it would pursue its own proposal for a vote on the euro.

Other senses of Trexit. Attested are trade (deal) + exit and Trinity (College, Cambridge) + exit. And also possible would be Trump + exit ‘exit by Trump’ (though Trump seems disinclined to leave).

A Latin note. We start with the Latin verb ‘go’, with principal parts:

present eo, infinitive i:re, perfect ii:, past participle i:tus

Then in combination with ex- ‘out’, the verb ‘go out, leave’, with principal parts:

present exeo, infinitive exi:re, perfect exii:, past participle exi:tus

It’s from this verb that English got the noun exit, and from the noun the verb (yes, to exit is an old verbing).

And then we can imagine a neo-Latin verb brexeo, brexi:re etc. ‘leave Britain’ (a verb with the meaning ‘leave by Britain’ would be incoherent because it has a subject built into it and cannot occur with a different subject supplied by the syntax). And trexeo, trexi:re etc. ‘leave because of Trump’.

Not quite what you think. Two cartoons: a Mother Goose and Grimm from yesterday, today’s Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

To appreciate #1, you need to know about the custom of putting out a cat for the night (V + Prt put out ‘put sth. outside (a house)’), and you need to recognize the piece of heavy earth-moving equipment in the room, with brand names Caterpilllar and (clipped) Cat.

To appreciate #2, you need to know that Zeus / Jupiter is the mythological hurler of thunderbolts, and you need to recognize Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (with one of his accompanying Things) and to see that the figure in the cartoon is a hybrid of Zeus and Dr. Seuss’s Cat, a combination conveyed by the portmanteau name Dr. Zeuss.

Heavy machinery. An ad for Cats:

(#3)

From Wikipedia, including the company’s own naming story:

Caterpillar Inc., is an American corporation which designs, manufactures, markets and sells machinery, engines, financial products and insurance to customers via a worldwide dealer network.Caterpillar is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives.

… Caterpillar machinery is recognizable by its trademark “Caterpillar Yellow” livery and the “CAT” logo.

… On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904, [Benjamin Holt] successfully tested [an] updated machine plowing the soggy delta land of Roberts Island [near Stockton CA].

Company photographer Charles Clements was reported to have observed that the tractor crawled like a caterpillar, and Holt seized on the metaphor. “Caterpillar it is. That’s the name for it!” Some sources, though, attribute this name to British soldiers in July 1907.

(In either case, the name seems to have been metaphorical.)

The hurler of thunderbolts. Hurling thunderbolts is one of the prime attributes of the Father of the Gods, as in these two statues, of Zeus Keraunos (keraunos ‘thunderbolt, lightning’) and of Jupiter of Smyrna:

(#4)

(#5)

The Cat in the Hat. Then there’s Dr. Seuss’s creation, discussed (and illustrated) in a posting of 10/17/13. From the book:

“I will pick up the hook.
you will see something new.
Two things. And I call them
Thing One and Thing Two.
These Things will not bite you.
They want to have fun.”
Then, out of the box
came Thing Two and Thing One!

(#6)

In #2, we see Thing 2 riding Zeuss’s thunderbolt.