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Horton and the detective mystery
Today’s Rhymes With Orange: Hilary Price is fond of phrasal overlap portmanteaus (POPs), as in this case: the Doctor Seuss title Horton Hears a Who overlapped with the odd compound whodunit, referring...
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portmantart
From the NYT on the 13th, in “For Enclave of Rebel Artists, Much in Life Was Free, but Not Real Estate” (by Elvire Camus): Illegal squats in Paris usually have a short life. After one year, perhaps...
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Vampire Manga Dog condo
In a paronoid dream in today’s Zippy, Griffy fixates on a phrase, which he then repeats like a mantra (as he’s given to doing to found phrases every so often): Vampire Manga Dog condo: savor it!...
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On the complex pun watch
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with two seals: The cartoon turns on the ambiguity of seal — the device or design, or the animal. Then it depends on the existence of the Good Housekeeping Seal of...
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scruffalicious
In a letter (from Doug W.) to Instinct magazine in the April/May 2012 issue: That hairy hunk in your fashion spread [“Winter Waters” Dec. 2012/Jan. 2013 ...] was scruffalicious. Just an ordinary...
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scruffilicious
Yesterday it was “Scruffalicious”, with photos of 7 handsome men (in the public eye in one way or another) who sometimes appear with scruffy faces. Then it occurred to me to wonder why the portmanteau...
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buck-rake
From Maureen Dowd’s NYT op-ed column (“Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery?”) today: She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But...
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fag bag
From various people on Facebook, this WPA poster with the compound fag bag: The fag here is the fag of cigarette smoking, though it turns out that there are now two notable uses of fag bag involving...
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The Sturgeon General
Periodically I’ve posted the Bizarro Sunday Punnies, always a set of three pun panels. Last Sunday’s (#29) led with one that amused me a lot: The title is a punning portmanteau: sturgeon (the fish) +...
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B.C. portmanteau
From Victor Steinbok, this B.C. cartoon (from 4/16/13) by Johnny Hart: This is intended to be a portmanteau both verbally and visually. Verbally, Mercedes-Benz overlapping with benzene. Visually, a...
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Brief mention: a portmant
A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque,...
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Nick Danger: an appreciation
My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed...
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Tacolicious
On Wednesday the Stanford QUEST group (queer staff and faculty) had our monthly happy hour, this time at Tacolicious in Palo Alto, a Mexican restaurant that not long ago replaced the Indian fusion...
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On the -mageddon watch
Rob Partington points me to recent stories on the 17-year cicadas, under the heading swarmageddon (swarm + Armageddon) — a topical portmanteau. That led me to the preposterous shawarmageddon, involving...
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More swarmanteaus
In a recent posting, I noted the portmanteau — or, possibly, use of a libfix -mageddon — in swarmageddon, as a name for this year’s cicada infestation in the eastern US (and picked up the entertaining...
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Plantanimals
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with an extraordinary plant-animal hybrid, accompanied by a portmanteau name: This is recognizably a daffodil with giraffe properties; in a compound, it’s a giraffe...
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Cattions
On AZBlogX, amended images from male photographers, amended by having captions added and B. Kliban cat stickers as well — hence the portmanteau name cattion (cat + caption), pronounced /kǽtʃǝn/, for...
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Manwich and Beefaroni as portmanteaus
My “Grocery store semiotics” posting looked briefly at two canned-food preparations: Manwich and Beefaroni. Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to...
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Bizarro portmanteau
Today’s Bizarro: That’s Zen + piñata, with a little joke on Zen. I’m especially fond of portmanteaus with diacritical marks in them; see the Rhymes With Orange with jalapiñot noir in it, here.
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hairy Harry and the asparagus
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau: (#1) That’s despair + asparagus. This is a stretch as a portmanteau for me, because the accented vowels in the two contributing words are distinct for...
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