Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Pearls Before Swine:

Pig’s grasp of English vocabulary is somewhat unsteady. Faced with the unfamiliar surreptitious ‘kept secret, esp. because it would not be approved of’ (NOAD2), he guesses that it’s a portmanteau — of syrup and delicious. That means he’s treating a word that is clearly an adjective in context — in these surreptitious programs — as a noun, meaning ‘syrup that’s delicious’. But people are frequently uncertain about parts of speech, and cartoon animals can’t be expected to do better.

This entry was posted on July 5, 2013 at 7:59 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, 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.