Heard on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, in a segment on sleepwalking: 14-year-old Miranda Kelly reporting a moment when she realized, “Oh, I sleptwalked.”
That’s double inflection, on both parts of the verb sleepwalk, where the standard form (sleepwalked) has inflection only on the second part, the head V walk.
Having looked at the names of minor-league baseball teams, I was moved to play with possible (but unlikely) names. A sampling, of a variety of formal types:
Boston Baked Beans, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, San Francisco Fire, Portland Cement, Tempe Fugits, San Diego Riveras, San Antonio Banderas, Santa Barbara Bush, Albuquerque Quirks, Dubuque Bucolics, Ketchican Canneries, Omaha Steaks, Lincoln Monuments, Baton Rouge Compacts
Feel free to play with the idea on your own.
More Far Side cartoons from Gary Larson’s Wiener Dog Art (though not involving wiener dogs): three playful variations on formulaic expressions.
First, a very silly variation on the compound wharf rat:
from Wikipedia:
The brown rat, common rat, street rat, sewer rat, Hanover rat, Norway rat, brown Norway rat, Norwegian rat, or wharf rat (Rattus norvegicus) is one of the best known and most common rats.
Such wharf rats hang around wharves, as do seafarers of all sorts (so that wharf rat is also slang for someone who frequents wharves).
Then a larger fixed expression, a famous quote:
A line from Lauren Bacall’s character in To Have and Have Not (1944):
You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.
Finally, a still more complicated, punning, one, based on a proverb:
People who live glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, as the proverb has it. Or in the more complicated pun (which requires some lead-up), people who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.
On Facebook, Betsy Herrington noted this sports story:
At age 50, [Roger] Clemens pitched 3 and 1/3 scoreless allowing 1 hit and striking out 2 for Sugar Land Skeeters.
adding:
Love minor-league team names.
Yes, they’re great. And there are so many teams.
While searching through the Zippy archives (in connection with this posting), I came across a series of strips in February 2007 that repurposed either the text or the graphics of another cartoon by combining it with Zippy material. Here are five with other texts but Zippy visuals and one with the reverse, in the fashion of Woody Allen’s movie What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, but in the comics medium.
Passed on by Edith Maxwell on Facebook, this New Yorker cartoon by Jack Ziegler:
Misspellings on menus have many sources. Many are typos of the simplest sort (inadvertent transpositions, anticipations, perseverations, etc.), and a great many are “ear spellings”, as Ceasar salad probably is here. Some are generalizations from the spelling of other expressions, as the hyphenated osso-buco might be here (cf. chaud-froid).
Some people annoy restaurateurs by writing corrections in on the menus. Others just complain. I have yet to see someone refuse to order a dish because its name was misspelled on the menu, or walk out of a restaurant because of its spelling, but who knows what spelling rage might do to people?
Today’s Rhymes With Orange and Zippy the Pinhead, both with portmanteaus:
Doctor + octopus. But notice that the creature in the strip is apparently a heptapus, with seven arms/feet rather than eight. As a matter of fact, there is a seven-arm octopus. From Wikipedia:
The Seven-arm Octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) is one of the two largest known species of octopus and based on scientific records has a total estimated length of 4 m and mass of 75 kg. The other large existing octopus is the Giant Pacific Octopus of the species Enteroctopus dofleini.
The Seven-arm Octopus is so named because in males the hectocotylus (a specially modified arm used in egg fertilization [i.e. a cephalopod penis]) is coiled in a sac beneath the right eye. Due to this species’ thick gelatinous tissue, the arm is easily overlooked, giving the appearance of just seven arms. However, like other octopuses, it actually has eight.
The genus name Heptapus has been entertained for the creature:
The genera Alloposina Grimpe, 1922, Alloposus Verrill, 1880 and Heptapus Joubin, 1929 are junior synonyms of Haliphron.
The sad diner + dinosaur (plus Lithuanians, who come up often in Zippy; French dip, which made a recent Zippy appearance in this blog; and the movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia combined with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen). Others have coined the portmanteau. Here, for example, is Wayne Gayla on his Jersey Bites site on 2/24/11:
A Diner-Saur Classic in Wall [NJ]
While our beloved drive-ins and neighborhood theaters are all but extinct from the American landscape and experience, there are a few survivors to testify to a mainstay of Jersey life, from the 1930s through the 60s. The Roadside Diner is one of those survivors. Perhaps that is the message they are sending with the bright green sculpture of a dinosaur who shares their space on Route 33 and 34 in Wall.
The Roadside Diner is the epitome of the classic, shimmering, stainless steel prefabricated units that punctuated two lane highways of the 30′s and 40′s and 50′s. It was built in Paterson, NJ, by Silk City, in the 1940s and brought to Wall in sections, then reassembled on a foundation.
True to original design, it replicates an old Railroad Dining Car, which once caught the imagination of the American traveler. Narrow interior with tight booths and a long polished Formica counter, set with chrome stools padded with red vinyl. The walls sparkle with the red and white checkered ceramic tile walls. In short, there is no painted surface to upkeep; everything was created for endurance and easy maintenance, right to the chrome window frames and door sill.
… Apparently, I was not the first to discover The Roadside Diner. Bon Jovi’s album cover for “Crossroads” was shot inside the diner. Bruce Springsteens’ video “Girls in their Summer Clothes” was filmed in part at the diner and John Sayles’ movie “Baby It’s You” was shot in part there, also.
The diner in this strip is not the same one as in the French dip strip, nor does it appear to be the Roadside Diner in Wall:
Eventually, the place will be identified in the “Where’s Zippy?” feature on the Zippy site, but at the moment those archives are only up to early 2007, so it could be some time. The drawing in the strip — virtually a generic diner, and nameless to boot — doesn’t give you a lot to go on.
The announcement for the 2013 Linguistic Institute, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, comes with this great graphic:
That’s a ferocious wolverine, the university’s mascot. Don’t mess with a wolverine.
An coupon offer today from AAA for a mani-pedi at a San Jose salon. I suppose the clippings mani (for manicure) and pedi (for pedicure, though it’s also attested for pedicab) have been around for quite some time, but this was the first time I’d really appreciated them.
For bibliophiles, this Incidental Comics cartoon, by Grant Snider, of 8/21/12:
As someone who lives amidst piles of books, with more coming in all the time, the cartoon speaks to me.
[Yes, that sentence has a non-canonical SPAR, also known as a “dangling modifier”. I wrote the sentence without reflecting on it or noticing the non-canonical SPAR in it, but I’m sticking by it; see my discussion of acceptable as-a SPARs here.]