Today’s Rhymes, in which a scarecrow gets a medical diagnosis:
As a one-time gardener, I thrill to the word loam, and of course I’m tickled by the idea of the scarecrow’s straw stuffing composting into dark, loamy soil, but my immediate focus here is the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) in the side comment below the title.
Background: loam is a fertile soil composed of clay, sand, and humus, and composting is a method for generating humus from lawn and garden clippings, leaves, food scraps, and more. I spent years creating humus this way, humus to work into the clay soil of our garden in Columbus OH, year after year, until we did have rich, loamy soil.
Onward: Hilary Price, the artist of Rhymes, is very fond of POPs — like garden bed rest (garden bed + bed rest) above. I’m not entirely sure how bed rest (lying fallow?) would help the unfortunate scarecrow’s malaise.
[Addendum: I have now created a Page under Linguistics Notes with an inventory of postings on POPs and related phenomena.]
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