The latest Bizarro:
Yet another POP (phrasal overlapping portmanteau), Larry King + King Kong = Larry King Kong. As postings on POPs (under various names) have noted, devising them makes for an entertaining language game — word association football, anyone? — and in fact most of the ones you come across are playful creations (genuinely useful POPs and POP-like inadvertent phrasal blends are pretty rare).
Looking at the Bizarro cartoon, I realized that a somewhat different game (or puzzle) could be extracted from them, one in which you telescope the POP by eliminating the shared middle element. Who’s Larry Kong? A gigantic gorilla with a television talk show.
Quite likely it’s been thought of already and been used on one of the many radio shows that celebrate word play.
June 18, 2010 at 11:20 am |
POP’s have occasionally been used as the gimmick in the Sunday NY Times crossword (overlap included).
June 18, 2010 at 8:22 pm |
[…] Arnold Zwicky's Blog A blog mostly about language « Telescoped POPs? […]
June 19, 2010 at 6:59 am |
One of my favorite POP pop band names is the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
June 27, 2010 at 9:13 pm |
[…] Arnold Stang, Eddie Albert Einstein, etc. — should be clear. I suggested in my posting on telescoped POPs that POPs could be made into a game by telescoping them, eliminating the overlapping middle term, […]
February 4, 2011 at 9:04 am |
[…] Telescoped POPs? (link). Telescoping Larry King Kong to Larry […]
December 7, 2011 at 9:41 am |
[…] Telescoped POPs (link): ? Larry King Kong telescoped to Larry […]