Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collab:

(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Not one, but two portmanteaus: for the ailment,  overemotion sickness = overemotional + motion sickness; and for the treatment, Melodramamine = melodrama + Dramamine. Plus the (melo)dramatic gesture.

In my 5/31/18 posting “Dramatic exits”: discussion of drama in several senses and of the conventional stage dramatic gesture.

From NOAD:

(#2)

noun melodrama: … [a] a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. [b] the genre of melodrama. [c] language, behavior, or events that resemble melodrama: what little is known of his early life is cloaked in melodrama. ORIGIN early 19th century: from French mélodrame, from Greek melos ‘music’ + French drame ‘drama’.

And then from Wikipedia:

Dimenhydrinate, marketed as Dramamine and Gravol among others, is an over-the-counter medication used to treat motion sickness and nausea. Dimenhydrinate is a combination of two drugs: diphenhydramine and 8-chlorotheophylline.

… Dimenhydrinate is recreationally used as a deliriant. Slang terms for Dramamine used this way include “drama”, “dime”, “dime tabs”, “D-Q”, “substance D”, “d-house”, and “drams”. Abusing Dramamine is sometimes referred to as Dramatizing or “going a dime a dozen”, a reference to the amount of Dramamine tablets generally necessary for a trip.

The adj./noun deliriant ‘(a drug) producing delirium’ is a nice find; also attested are euphoriant ‘(a drug) producing euphoria’ and exhilarant ‘(a drug) producing exhilaration’.

Another note: there’s Dramamine for children (of course), but also for dogs and for cats. I haven’t seen any reports of household pets getting high on the stuff, however.

This entry was posted on August 28, 2018 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Gesture, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, 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.