And venison is from Venus

Marsupials are from Mars, according to Ruthie in One Big Happy:

Faced with marsupial, which looks like it has Mars as its first element (and sounds pretty close to that), Ruthie chops out the Mars and comes up with a second element upial. So she’s treating the whole word as a N + N compound, which means that upial is the head N, and if the compound is as simple as possible, it’s subsective: a marsupial is then a kind of upial — a variety from Mars.

Ruthie has then given marsupial the demi-eggcorn treatment, analyzing Mars in it and flying with the possibility that upial is an English noun (with a meaning she doesn’t happen to know).

This entry was posted on December 19, 2016 at 11:11 am and is filed under Compounds, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones. 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.

One Response to “And venison is from Venus”

arnold zwicky Says:
December 26, 2016 at 9:07 am | Reply
From Chris Waigl on Facebook:

I’m obliquely reminded of Fred Endrikat’s famous poem about a very mean (gemein) vole (Wühlmaus) that gnaws (nagt) a root (Wurzel) until there’s very little left of it. First graders all over the German-speaking countries have learnt it by heart.

Die Wühlmaus

Die Wühlmaus nagt von einer Wurzel
das W hinfort; bis an die -urzel
sie nagt dann an der hintern Stell‘
auch von der -urzel noch das l
Die Wühlmaus nagt und nagt, o weh,
auch von der -urze- noch das e.
Sie nagt die Wurzel klein und kurz,
bis aus der -urze- wird ein -urz–
Die Wühlmaus ohne Rast und Ruh
nagt von dem -urz– auch noch das u.
Der Rest ist schwer zu reimen jetzt,
es bleibt zurück nur noch ein –rz–.
Nun steht dies –rz– im Wald allein
Die Wühlmäuse sind so gemein!

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