spork

Today’s Bizarro takes on the spork, a portmanteau implement with a portmanteau name:

The spork manages to be neither a fully satisfying spoon nor a fully satisfying fork. (I enjoy the word, though.) Its virtue is that it allows places that supply eating utensils to get by with fewer of them.

The playpus has not evolved a spork bill, no doubt because its spoon-like bill works so well in scooping up small creatures from riverbeds and catching them while swimming.

5 Responses to “spork”

  1. xyzzyva Says:

    That cartoon doesn’t work well for me: it plays off the duck-billed platypus, so it lacks parallelism.

    A better animal to play with (both in name and picture) might have been the Spoonbill, but it’s not nearly so widely-known, so its comedic potential is limited.

  2. Neal Says:

    When Erin McKean filled in for William Safire in July 2007, she had some interesting things to say about spork, based on the Oxford English Corpus.

  3. Barty Says:

    I agree with the first poster. That platypus sickens me. Funny cartoon, though!

  4. Inventory of portmanteau postings « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:

    […] AZBlog, 12/9/09: Spork (link) […]

  5. Saturday comics | Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:

    […] mentioned on this blog (spork is a portmanteau word, referring to a combination object), notably in a posting “Spork” of 12/9/09 that features a Bizarro cartoon involving a spork-billed platypus. […]

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