Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… in today’s Zippy strip:

(#1)

Not a wine emporium, but a diner specializing in RI-style hot dogs. And it’s been featured in Zippy at least twice before.

From my 8/15/17 posting “More Zippy-O-Rama”:

[about #1 there:] Wein-O-Rama (Cranston RI) [panel 1], Billy’s Burg-O-Rama (Oxford MA), and Liquorama (stores with that name in many locations), plus Zippy’s own coining, Shrink-O-Rama. As it happens, Bill Griffith has used the imagery in #1 for at least one other strip, which I posted on Language Log on 1/20/07 [#2 in this posting]

[There are photos of Wein-O-Rama in #3 and #4 there.]

Wein-O-Rama not only has the libfix -orama, but it’s also a portmanteau of weiner (the Rhode Island spelling of wiener ‘hot dog’) and -orama, with an overlap in /ǝr/, yielding -ama as an apparent variant of -orama..

The competition among places offering Rhode Island weiners is substantial. Wein-O-Rama gets good reviews, but then so does the Olneyville N.Y. System chain; on Olneyville and the type of hot dogs it provides, see my 12/3/15 posting “Olneyville New York System” and the link in it.

Wein-O-Rama is a 1960s-style diner specializing in RI weiners. A trio of little hot weiners from the diner:

(#2) Weiners all the way: smothered in special meat sauce, with mustard, onions, and celery salt

This entry was posted on January 30, 2018 at 5:15 am and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics. 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.