Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
Pig’s grasp of English vocabulary is somewhat unsteady. Faced with the unfamiliar surreptitious ‘kept secret, esp. because it would not be approved of’ (NOAD2), he guesses that it’s a portmanteau — of syrup and delicious. That means he’s treating a word that is clearly an adjective in context — in these surreptitious programs — as a noun, meaning ‘syrup that’s delicious’. But people are frequently uncertain about parts of speech, and cartoon animals can’t be expected to do better.
