Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Three portmanteau items from recent e-mail and web explorations: from meteorology, from a site featuring X-rated male photography, and in a Rhymes With Orange cartoon.

First, from NOAA meteorologist Sim Aberson:

In the tropical cyclone world, we are working on trying to get models to forecast when tropical cyclones will form. One major problem is that the models currently spin up many tropical cyclones in their forecasts that never verify. These spurious systems have been labeled “spuricanes.” Credit to Cecile Penland of NOAA for coming up with the term.

On from spuricane to Masculinfinity, the name of a website where over an enormous number (over 140,000 — a virtual infinity!) of X-rated photographs of men, tagged by fetishes. (I’ll eventually post on my X blog about one image, filed under both Tearooms and the Mushroom Head subcategory of Cocks.) (Now posted 2/5, as “T-room action”, on my X blog, here.)

And then to Rhymes, with the phrasal overlap portmanteau boomchickadee:

That’s boom chic(k), imitative of a musical rhythm (especially as produced by percussion instruments), overlapped with chickadee, the name of a bird.

Some history of boom + chic(k), going backwards in time:

Wikipedia entry as accessed this morning:

Boom Chicka Boom is an album by American country music icon Johnny Cash, released in 1990 … on Mercury Records. The title refers to the sound that Cash’s backing band, the Tennessee Three were said to produce.

Then, apparently unrelated, another Wikipedia entry as accessed this morning:

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is a bestselling 1989 children’s book drawn and written by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault, illustrated by Lois Ehlert, and published by Aladdin Picture Books. This book is about anthropomorphized letters, who climb up a coconut tree in alphabetical order, until the tree collapses. Capital letters (the older relatives of the letters climbing the tree) come to help them. Again alphabetically, it describes each letter’s injury, such as “skinned-knee D”. The book is notable for its rhyming structure which is reminiscent of the jazz vocal improvisation technique known as scat singing.

There is an accompanying children’s song.

And then, the famous “Chica Chica Boom Chic” (a song by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon) made famous by Carmen Miranda in That Night in Rio (1941), where the repeated “Chica Chica Boom Chic” imitates the rhythm of a song/dance sweeping Brazil. (In addition to the fabulous Carmen Miranda version, I have covers by Susannah McCorkle, Astrud Gilberto, and Bebel Gilberto; there are more.)

Finally, a note on POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus) as covered on Language Log and here. An inventory:

AZ on LLog, 1/24/10: Sweet tooth fairies (link). With a link to an Erin McKean column.

3/22/10: Dilating eye teeth (link)

5/13/10: Phrasal overlap portmanteaus (link)

6/12/10: Morphological overlap portmanteaus (link). Also known as playmanteaus.

6/13/10: The Commencement pun crop (link). With Bizarro playmanteaus.

6/18/10: Telescoped POPs? (link). Telescoping Larry King Kong to Larry Kong?

6/27/10: Telescoped POPs with a twist (link)

6/28/10: POP games (link)

8/6/10: Zippy taken over by Valley Girl (link). Including Square Root Beer.

This entry was posted on February 4, 2011 at 9:03 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.