In the October 6 Zippy, Shelf-Life hawks supercharged Sno Balls:
Several linguistically interesting points here, but I’ll pick two: the portmanteau kidult and the dinosaur in the headlights figure.
A kidult (kid + adult) is someone in transition from kid to adult (as in the cartoon), or an adult reverting to some childish ways. Huge number of ghits.
Then there’s the graffiti artist (or vandal, depending on your point of view) KIDULT, who combines child and adult in his own way. From a recent interview:
My identity: Kidult aka KID, I was born in Paris and I live in NYC. West 129th Street, New York 10027. I am the enfant terrible (terrible kid) who attacks [windows of high-end shops] in a legitimate, simple way, without limits, with a spraypaint extinguisher. … I try to remain a kid who paints his reality in a raw, carefree way. I aspire to maintain the creativity and honesty of a child in order to expose, simply and efficiently, an unsettling message. That is KIDULT !
Now, dinosaur in the headlights. This is also a combination, of metaphoric dinosaur —
a person or thing that is outdated or has become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances (NOAD2)
with the metaphoric trope deer in the headlights (sometimes applied to other animals, like rabbits and hares, as well), referring to someone frozen into inaction in the face of an oncoming threat, and to the look that accompanies the experience.
At least one person has run with this combination before: motivational writer George Ebert, in a parable about unappreciated threats to the earth from the asteroid Hermes, with a conclusion that alludes to the proposal that the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to the impact of an asteroid:
Pay attention to new information because it’s easily ignored. Pay attention to your assumptions about how things are because you may be wrong. And pay attention to what’s going on when you aren’t looking. If you pay attention you might end up being surprised by what you find and at the same time avoid wearing that dinosaur in the headlights look!
Pay attention! And stock up on Extreme Sno Balls.
October 9, 2011 at 8:36 am |
Even if I could get Sno-Balls here in London, I probably couldn’t eat them. So not sure whether their absence is a good or a bad thing.
The website “kidult.co.uk” (not formatting it as a link lest there be commercial consequences) sells games to adults.
The whole idea of a kidult smells faintly to me of a man in a black overcoat offering candy to children.