Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Silliness for a Saturday morning. The first offering comes from the Jalopnik site (pointed out to me by Tim Pierce and Tim Wilson), and the second was suggested by some breakfast repartee between my daughter and grand-daughter, in which Elizabeth offered Opal a choice between salmon Benedict (her usual, eggs Benedict with salmon instead of ham) and banana slug waffles (banana slug food is a standing family joke), and I wondered about banana slug splits.

The Wienermobile. In the news on what has become Paul Ryan Day (it’s almost impossible to avoid the man at the moment), because, as Matt Hardigree wrote on the Jalopnik site,

Paul Ryan Used To Drive The Wienermobile

You’re going to be hearing a lot about Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan when he’s picked as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate later this morning. Here’s something they may not tell you: he used to drive the Wienermobile and sell meat products for Oscar Mayer in the upper-Midwest.

From Wikipedia:

A “Wienermobile” is an automobile shaped like a hot dog on a bun that is used to promote and advertise Oscar Mayer products. It was created in 1936 by Oscar’s nephew, Carl G. Mayer, and variants are still used by Oscar Mayer today. Drivers of the Wienermobiles are known as Hotdoggers and often hand out toy whistles shaped as replicas of the Wienermobile, known as Wienerwhistles.

A Wienermobile model, out in public:

Wienermobile is a portmanteau of wiener and automobile, formally similar to Oldsmobile. The element -mobile is on its way to becoming a libfix, in that it can now be attached to virtually any personal name, to jocularly denote a car belonging to that person: Zwickymobile, Arnoldmobile, etc.

Banana slug split. A complex phrasal portmanteau, of banana slug and banana split. And the subject of much visual play. This site, for instance, has a recipe for a very simple fruit snack that sort of resembles a banana slug. But, more spectacularly, the banana slug figures in a posting on Ray William Johnson’s Daily Internet Culture site, “7 animals that would probably be delicious”: ostriches, giant sloth, micropigs, reindeer, chupacabra, banana slug, and jellyfish (some are edible, even delicious, others not so much, and who knows about the chupacabra). On the banana slug:

Call us crazy, but we have a feeling that these suckers would taste like a fresh-as-can-be gummy worm with a pure banana flavor! Slice them up and drop the pieces over yogurt. Blend it with some flour and sugar and you’ve got banana slug bread. Split it down the middle and cover it with ice cream in toppings and invite your best friend over for a banana slug split. And lets keep this a secret between the two of us, but we’ve heard that licking a live banana slug will give you the tingles on your tongue! What could be better than a meal that tickles you back on your tongue?

In a picture, with a real banana slug out in front:

I think I’ll stick to wieners.

This entry was posted on August 11, 2012 at 9:50 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Libfixes, 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.