Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Hilary Price is enormously fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus). Here we get:

gingerbread house + house of correction = gingerbread house of correction

gingerbread house is a non-subsective compound (a gingerbread house isn’t a house, but it resembles one). And house of correction (NOAD2: ‘an institution for the short-term confinement of minor offenders’) is an administrative euphemism for jail.

Meanwhile, as I was preparing this posting, a broadcast of an old NCIS: Los Angeles episode brought me this complex gem:

That [FBI] badge better be real, or my partner’s going to kick you in the FBI balls.

Two levels here. At the upper level, we get a combo:

kick s.o. in the balls + FBI balls = kick s.o. in the FBI balls

And at the lower level, we get a straightforward POP:

FBI + eyeballs = FBI balls

Getting kicked in the balls is painful; getting kicked in the eyeballs sounds much more painful, and damaging.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2016 at 8:20 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, 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.