Two things came together yesterday to take me into centaur territory: watching the porn flick Centurians (sic) of Rome and coming across a postcard reproduction of The Education of Achilles by Chiron by Donato Creti (1714). The movie I’ve posted about on my X blog, here (though I’ll have a bit more to say about it); here’s the painting, featuring Chiron the centaur:
The juxtaposition led me to wonder if there were centaurians to be found. And of course, Chironically, there are.
Caught on Facebook a couple of days ago, a wry reference to the Faceborg. And there it is in the Urban Dictionary (and lots of other places):
1. FaceBorg
The collective consciousness residing in the domain of Facebook and other social network venues that threaten to assimilate your individuality.
(by HammerTime2 May 7, 2009)2. Faceborg
The coming Facebookization of the nation, where every man, woman and chile is merged into one social networking soup of humanity.
(by lisat2 Apr 21, 2010)
And on a CafePress t-shirt:
That’s the race of cybernetically enhanced beings (constituting a single being) in the Star Trek universe.
In the latest issue of Funny Times (for June 2011), a hilarious piece (“Road Warrior Specials”) by Dave Barry on the car harpoon, or carpoon, which turns out to be a reprint of a column from December 1, 1996 (copies can be found on many sites).
Carpoon is a fine portmanteau, and there’s some entertaining material on carpoons (of several types).
Big influx of interesting portmanteau finds in the last few days. But before I get to them in other postings, a puzzler from the Nightcharm site (“Naked Men Pictures and Videos, Nude Males, Gay Erotica and Gay Porn” — with essays), where we find, in an entry by Shawn Baker on cumshots:
There was a time when the portmanteau term “cumshot” wasn’t a fixture in the English lexicon.
Portmanteau?
With grief in my heart, I report the death (on Saturday, May 14, in Edinburgh, Scotland, of lung cancer) of my old friend and respected colleague Barbara C. Scholz. A few things about her life and work and then some personal recollections.
Yesterday, on my iTunes set to random play, the wonderful sequence: The Lonely Island’s “Jizz in My Pants” immediately followed by the Edwin Hawkins Singers doing “Oh Happy Day”.
A colleague and I have been wrestling with the question of death notices on Language Log. We have somewhat different notions of what LLog should be, and in my colleague’s estimation, death notices are inappropriate, though (regrettably, to this friend’s mind) the LLoggers have posted a number of them.
As a contribution to the discussion, here’s my list of obit postings on new LLog and this blog; you can find the links by searching on the posting titles. (My own are boldfaced.)
The long-running saga of remarkable men’s underwear continues on my X blog, with “The lure of lace”, here.
Today’s Zippy:
So there are two groups, distinguishable by physical or behavioral traits, and each group lives in communities that largely excludes the other. So each takes itself as the norm — the unmarked case — and views the other as marked (special, notable), and consequently has a special term to name the other: roundhead, pinhead.
It is the way of such things that these terms quickly become seen as slurs, even if they weren’t meant that way originally.
And then there’s Herbie Popnecker, the fat superhero (Wikipedia entry here); of course, Bill Griffith wouldn’t make something like that up. Here’s Herbie confronting another preposterous comic-book superhero, the Flaming Carrot (Wikipedia entry here):
How phallic is that?
