On the heels of the phrasal overlap portmanteau (POP) iPad Thai, today’s Bizarro gives us photographic memory foam mattress:
That’s the idiom photographic memory + the commercial compound memory foam mattress ‘mattress made of memory foam’, giving our traveler an unpleasant surprise in his bed.
Via Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, a video on
Why You Should Spiral-Cut Your Wiener
No thank you.
Oh… it’s from CHOW.com, on grilling hot dogs:
CHOW.com’s Blake Smith shows how the simple technique of cutting a spiral pattern into your hot dog before grilling it will not only improve the wiener-eating experience, but will also transform the dog into a conversation starter.
It seems to have been two months since my last phallicity posting (of May 20th): “Creepy phallicity”, also on hot dog phallicity (link). Well, it’s hot dog season.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
The reference is to surrealist René Magritte‘s “The Son of Man”, a painting that combines Magritte’s focus on identity (often involving a figure much like his own) and his use of an apple as a thematic element:
From my friend Max yesterday, a postcard version of artwork by Michael Kupperman for The Believer:
It starts with a series of rhyming compounds — Maceface, Spacerace Face, Afro Laceface — and then branches out into merely preposterous compounds (with images to go along with them), like Moby Dickface and Mount Rushmore Face.
And then there’s Dick Crazy, an imperfect pun on Dick Tracy.
Having just posted on Pad Thai, I should have realized that the inevitable techie phrasal overlap portmanteau (or POP) would have cropped up: iPad Thai. And so it has.
From Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, a link to a piece by food writer Alexandra Greeley in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture: “Finding Pad Thai”, which begins:
For many westerners, pad Thai—or, more accurately, kway teow pad Thai (stir-fried rice noodles Thai-style)—symbolizes Thai cooking, thanks in large part to the Thai government’s ongoing efforts to introduce the country’s food to the rest of the world. The campaign has been resoundingly successful…
If Westerners believe that pad Thai symbolizes Thai cooking, many Thais agree [and judge Thai restaurants around the world by this dish] … [But in Thailand itself] many restaurants choose not to compete with the street-food vendors, who make and serve only pad Thai all day long and thus have perfected the recipe.
Pad Thai is really nothing more than a regular noodle dish, one that is not even native to Thailand. Its full name, kway teow pad Thai, hints at its possible Chinese origins; kway teow, in Chinese, refers to rice noodles. It is likely that some early version of the dish came to Thailand with settlers crossing from southern China, who brought their own recipe for fried rice noodles.
… Prime Minister Pibulsonggram [Phibunsongkhram in Wikipedia, Phibunsonkhram in OED3; known as Phibun] … is universally credited with having popularized today’s pad Thai recipe by codifying, and perhaps even creating, it.
On the one hand, Greeley says that Pad Thai is “not even native to Thailand”, but on the other, she recognizes that today’s recipe is a specifically Thai creation. There’s no real contradiction here: most dishes have some history taking them back (usually in somewhat different, even rudimentary, form) to places and cultures other than the one they’re now associated with.
Today’s Bizarro:
A pun on boss, used here in the childish formula You’re not the boss of me! and also in Bruce Springsteen’s nickname The Boss.
Come across on the net a while back:
The 36th Street station in Brooklyn has one tiny flaw that sets it apart from all the other subway stations in the city: One of its stairs “is a fraction of an inch higher” than the rest. (link)
No problem there. But the accompanying video has the caption:
Something that makes it unique from any other subway station in the city.
And to my surprise, “makes it unique from” gets thousands of raw ghits, as do other predicative uses of unique from ‘different / distinct / distinguished / separate from’. So unique (with its semantics of separation or distinction) has, for some speakers, picked up the syntax of different — in more than this respect, it turns out.
A Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon by Ruben Bolling, caught yesterday in Funny Times (which was reprinting it from April):
Many guffaws, especially at the last panel, with its hazmat decontamination team.
Cooties are part of the popular lore of childhood (at least in the U.S.), with an interesting linguistic history.
The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus). Then there are those that appear to be meant to be useful, but are awkward and unlikely to succeed: for instance the dubious portmanteaus Innovatrium, womance (and femily), and twunk. Two more have recently been logged on ADS-L: mediot(s) and preglimony.