Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Wayno / Piraro 8/12 Bizarro: “The Metromorphosis”:

metro- [the libfix, representing the noun metrosexual] + metamorphosis [the abstract noun meaning ‘transformation’] = metromorphosis ‘transformation to metrosexuality’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Two contributors:

metro–. From NOAD:

noun metrosexual: a man who lives in an urban area and enjoys shopping, fashion, and similar interests traditionally associated with women or gay men: the men in my family are not metrosexuals. ORIGIN 1990s: [portmanteau] of metropolitan and heterosexual

From which the libfix metro-, standing in for the whole word, results.

metamorphosis, the abstract noun — here in an allusion to Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis] (1915), the first sentence of which sets the story, Gregor Samsa as a huge insect:

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt

So we’ve got a metro metamorphosis ‘transformation to metrosexuality’, in which the two contributors share the underlined bit. Factoring that out gives us: metromorphosis.

Sweet.

This entry was posted on August 13, 2026 at 11:27 am and is filed under Books, German, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, 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.