Arnold Zwicky's Blog

An Ellis Rosen cartoon that came by on Facebook recently:

(#1) The hybrid creature the pomeranian-nimbus, being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner — so being presented as an extraordinary dog, a cloud canine; note that the woman’s dog recognizes the p-n as a dog, and appears to want to play with it (see the wagging tail)

(The name of the dog breed is standardly capitalized, because it’s a proper name denoting a creature originating in the geographical region of Pomerania, and I’ll use Pomeranian from here on.)

The compound Pomeranian-nimbus is a copulative  N1 + N2 compound (like Swiss-American or hunter-gatherer), denoting a thing or things of both the N1 type and the N2 type.  But in fact the creature is not just a mix of Pomeranian dog and nimbus cloud, but is actually a nimbus Pomeranian ‘Pomeranian dog that is (also) a nimbus cloud’ (your standard N + N compound in English is semantically modifier + head) — rather than a Pomeranian nimbus ‘nimbus cloud that is also, or at least resembles, a Pomeranian dog’. A nimbus Pomeranian, or, more compactly, a nimbopomeranian, a nimpom for short.

Silly digression on the nimpom. Now, a brief excursion to my 8/1/13 posting “The Luffa and the Wompom”, with a note on Flanders and Swann’s multi-purpose plant the Wompom:

You can do such a lot with a Wompom,
You can use every part of it too.
For work or for pleasure,
It’s a triumph, it’s a treasure,
Oh there’s nothing that a Wompom cannot do.

Truly, there’s nothing that a nimpom Wompom — that universal cloud dog — cannot do. Even stand-up comedy: let’s hear it for nimpom Wompom improv!

Ok, I’ll stop now.

Clouds. nimbus is Latin for ‘rain-bearing cloud’ and is used non-technically in English for a ‘a large gray rain cloud’, technically a nimbostratus  ‘a type of cloud forming a thick uniform gray layer at low altitude, from which rain or snow often falls (without any lightning or thunder)’ — in contrast to a cumulonimbus ‘a cloud forming a towering mass with a flat base at fairly low altitude and often a flat top, as in thunderstorms’ (all definitions from NOAD).

Cartoons on extraordinary dogs. Just one further example, from my 3/31/25 posting “Hybrid portmanteaus”, the triceradoodle, a hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle; its name is a combination of tricera– (from triceratops) and the libfix word-part –doodle ‘poodle cross’:

(#2) A Michael Shaw cartoon in the New Yorker, in whch a triceradoodle is being taken for a walk, on a leash, by its owner

The triceratops seems to be prone to indiscriminate cross-breeding, with all sorts of partners. Consider the Triceramisu, a hybrid beast with a portmanteau name: Triceratops + tiramisu, that is, Tricera (tops) + (tira) misu:

(#3) It’s a (miniature) herbivorous quadrupedal dinosaur and an Italian dessert consisting of layers of sponge cake soaked in coffee and brandy (or liqueur) with powdered chocolate and mascarpone cheese (from my 8/24/21 posting “The Triceramisu”)

The cartoonist of #1. See my 12/13/23 posting “I’ll take Manhattan”, with some information on Ellis Rosen.

This entry was posted on October 12, 2025 at 10:13 am and is filed under Abbreviation, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Meteorology, Music, Names, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Word attraction. 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.