… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The POP’s two contributors. First, from NOAD:
noun laissez-faire: [a] [usually as modifier] a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering: a laissez-faire attitude to life. [b] Economics abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market: [as modifier]: laissez-faire capitalism. ORIGIN French, literally ‘allow to do’.
Then, fairy godmother in Wikipedia:
In fairy tales, a fairy godmother (French: fée marraine) is a fairy with magical powers who acts as a mentor or parent to someone, in the role that an actual godparent was expected to play in many societies. In Perrault’s Cinderella, he concludes the tale with the moral that no personal advantages will suffice without proper connections.
And at the opera:
(#2) Poster for Jules Massenet’s opera Cendrillon (based on Perrault’s Cinderella) showing the titular character’s fairy godmother. (Wikipedia illustration)
Then, about Cinderella in Wikipedia:
“Cinderella”, or “The Little Glass Slipper”, is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage.
… the version that is now most widely known in the English-speaking world was published in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697 as Cendrillon and was anglicized as Cinderella.
A French fairy POP. Inspired by the English Bizarro POP, I constructed a fairy POP in French, but it’s not nearly as clever as the Bizarro one:
Le baiser de la fée marraine ‘the fairy godmother’s kiss’ = Le baiser de la fée ‘The Fairy’s Kiss‘ + fée marraine ‘fairy godmother’
(Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) is a neoclassical ballet in one act and four scenes composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1928 and revised in 1950 for George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. (Wikipedia))
The overlap is the word fée ‘fairy’ (in both contributing phrases). The Bizarro POP is impressive because it involves a pun: the overlap /fer/ represents the word faire in the first contributor, but the first syllable of the word fairy in the second.
You can get something of the effect of the Bizarro pun POP by using a woman’s name with Fay or Faye as FN: Le baiser de la Fay Wray / Faye Dunaway. Picture a neoclassic ballet in which Fay Wray kisses King Kong, or Faye Dunaway as Bonnie kisses Warren Beatty as Clyde.
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