🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
A monster modifier in three parts: hoozama-flazama-doozama — call it HFD for short. Three aspects of HFD:
First, what it conveys, connotes, or evokes: unimaginably enormous size, reinforcing what’s conveyed by the number-word jillions (an unimaginably enormous number). HFD is what you might call a superword, a word like the invention supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the movie Mary Poppins, alluding to something inexpressibly wonderful, significant, or big.
Second, physical or emotional size is evoked, iconically, by an enormously long expression: 14 syllables for the Poppins word, 9 for HFD. An effect that’s enhanced by word-bits, like [u … z … hu … uz … huz] in HFD, that, through sound symbolism or by evoking existing words, suggest or connote size or amazement.
Third, the whole word comes in three phonetically parallel sections, as indicated above. Which means that the whole word (plus the word it modifies) can function like a little poem:
hoozama
flazama
doozama
… jillions
(#2) The poem “How Much Do I Love Thee”
It could work as a rap lyric (though it’s not at all edgy). Certainly it could be set to music. Maybe as an art song.
Superwords. First, about the Poppins word, from Wikipedia:
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is a song and single from the 1964 Disney musical film Mary Poppins. It was written by the Sherman Brothers, and sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It also appears in the 2004 stage show version.
… The song occurs in the chalk-drawing outing animated sequence, just after Mary Poppins wins a horse race. Flush with her victory, she is immediately surrounded by reporters who pepper her with questions and suggest that she is at a loss for words. Mary disagrees, saying that at least one word is appropriate for the situation, and begins the song with this very word.
The word has a complex history, explored in the Wikipedia piece. But insofar as the various creators of the word had specific ideas in mind, they’re beside the point, which is what the word conveys to those who hear it and how it does so: what we all have to go on is that it starts with super ‘very good, excellent’ and ends with an adjective-forming suffix, –ous; that it’s very long; and that in the context of the film it conveys something like ‘wonderful, amazing, significant’ (that is, emotionally big; in another context it might convey physical size). That’s the first aspect of this word.
For HFD, as above.
Feelings, not meanings. Beyond that, everybody gets some complex, vague and shifting swirl of images and associations via the sound-symbolic values of the phonetic material of a superword; and via whatever word associations pieces of the word might evoke for a particular person on some occasion. Few people will be able to pick these out or make any of them explicit, however; what we get is affect — feelings. Indefinite feelings, not meanings of the sort you could put in a dictionary. And these will vary from person to person and from occasion to occasion.
To illustrate from the superword HFD:
[u … z … fl … hu … du … uz … za … ma], and more, all have sound-symbolic values, and these will tinge HFD’s affect. (Here I lament the 2023 death of my old friend and excellent colleague John Lawler, who had tons of material on sound-symbolic values, much of which he could just pull up from memory; he would have enjoyed telling us about the stuff in HFD.)
Meanwhile, insofar as we’re able to hear echos of existing words in word-pieces, they too color the affect of a superword. In the –zama from HFD, I hear an echo of panorama. Maybe Zuma (the Los Angeles beach) or Montezuma. Maybe the z goes with the preceding stuff, suggesting, say, doozy (‘something outstanding or unique’). Maybe it goes with the following stuff, suggesting Amazon or amaze. Or perhaps flame is in there somewhere. Or hoozamacallit ‘whatisname’. Or hoot. Or hoo-hah. Or who’s a good boy?, said to a dog. I could go on in this vein for quite some time. So, probably, could you, except that you’d surely pull up a different set of associated expressions. And probably different ones on different days. You let your mind run free, and all kinds of things pop up.
The three parallel sections. hoozama-flazama-doozama. Three half-rhyming nonsense words with identical prosody, which makes the trio a candidate for a little poem, as in #2. Now, a completely irrelevant matter that I nevertheless have to expose: the cartoon presents the nonsense words via English spelling, but there are in fact three different pronunciations for each of them. I’ll assume that everyone gives the three words parallel pronunciations, but I have no idea which of them Jill Johnston had in mind when she created the cartoon.
Quick summary: the words either have initial accent (so SWW prosody) or medial accent (WSW prosody); and for the second pattern, the accented vowel can be either /æ/ or /a/. For hoozama, the options are:
1 /′huzǝmǝ/ 2a /hu′zæmǝ/ 2b /hu′zamǝ/
(and similarly for the others). For what it’s worth, the reading I gave to Johnston’s spelling hoozama, without any reflection on the matter, was the reading 1 — your mileage might vary — so that for me the trio would be:
/′huzǝmǝ ′flæzǝmǝ OR ′flazǝmǝ ′duzǝmǝ/
(whether I use /æ/ or /a/ for the spelling a in an open syllable seems to be a matter of the phase of the moon).
Final note. These two hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions postings are no doubt a great deal more than Masayoshi Yamada was expecting when he wrote me.
May 1, 2025 at 6:13 am |
It never occurred to me to think of accenting any of the parts elsewhere than on the first syllable.
May 1, 2025 at 6:43 am |
Nor to me at first. Eventually it occurred to me that hoozama might be accented like hosanna — and then, just now, that hosanna might in fact be a prominent word association for the HFD superword.