Back on Thursday 11/6, amid the hour-long marathon of signing and notarizing documents, the jaunty house notary remarked, with surprise and delight, that she’d never had an A.Z. before, never in 25 years on the job. (There are a fair number worldwide, but, it seems, very few in the US — and there have apparently only ever been two Arnold Zwickys, the other being my father.) On a quick ramble through my memory, I found only three Americans:
Archive for the ‘Abbreviation’ Category
A.Z.
November 8, 2025The Pomeranian-nimbus
October 12, 2025An 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.
Capades on ice
September 28, 2025From Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday:
It’s once again been brought to my attention that many people seem not to grasp that Ice Capades is a play on words and that they are not in fact capades on ice.
(I myself learned this at a rather advanced age, but: earlier than today.)
Well, Ice Capades originated as a play on words, but that doesn’t mean it still is (only) a play on words. History is not destiny. BD tells us, in fact, that many people — I would say almost all of us — don’t appreciate that it originated as a play on words. Which is to say that for all these people it is not a play on words, but an odd compound of ice and capades. Just as, for almost everyone these days, the name of SRI International (a Silicon Valley R&D nonprofit institute) is just a string of letter names, not an abbreviation for anything, despite the fact that the organization began its life as the Stanford Research Institute (I know this, but I’m a very old man, 6 years older than the Stanford Research Institute); SRI is now an orphan initialism.
So now, a lot of facts.
The helicopterodactyl
November 15, 2024From Season Devereux this morning, this excellent image on Threads, from the poster linguisticdiscovery:
Two flying entities, the helicopter and the pterodactyl, are about to hybridize, to merge into a single thing, which will then obviously be denoted by the portmanteau helicopterodactyl — Is it a plane? (not exactly, though it’s a kind of aircraft) Is it a bird? (not exactly, though it has wings) It’s Superfly!
Ambiguity day in the comics
September 26, 2024Complex ambiguities in the 9/25 comics: a Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange turning on the ambiguity of sham; and a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro turning on the ambiguity of tom:
(#1) sham conveying fraud, hence illegality; vs. sham for a decorative pillow cover (being manufactured in a small workshop, though note the suggestion in the title panel that the place might be a cover — ambiguity alert! — in the sense ‘an activity or organization used as a means of concealing an illegal or secret activity’ (NOAD) — but why are these pillow coverings called shams?
(#2) Personified, talking animals: two toms, a tomcat and a tom turkey, presented as characters named Tom, who work for the same company and are encountering one another over coffee, hence Wayno’s title “Breakroom Encounter” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Gimme a Z, gimme an X
September 24, 2024Mike Pope on Facebook yesterday, about this banner on e-mail that had come to him:
— MP: I mean, wtf is “Zix®” and why would this banner across an email in any way reassure me about anything?
Followed by this exchange between Mike and me:
— AZ > MP: Ordinarily, I’d expect you to look it up yourself, but as a Z-person (and indeed as Zot, son of Zip), I had to check it out myself. To discover that …
Zix Email Encryption is now Webroot™ Advanced Email Encryption powered by Zix™
— MP > AZ: I CAN look it up, but I’m playing the part of Ordinary Email User here, for whom something like this banner is … nothing. … If I were spoofing/phishing emails, it would be very easy to add this same banner to my outbound emails to provide an illusion of security.
I take Mike’s point here, but will now forge on to something completely different, in a substantial alphabetic digression inspired by the trade name Zix, which manages to pack two association-rich letters from the end of the alphabet, Z and X, into a monosyllable.
But first, a note that the encryption company was not the first to see the imaginative potential in a Z…X name.
Annals of mishearing: effing gee, the carpet store
September 16, 2024A frequently experienced tv commercial in recent days, encountered at first only through the audio, which I heard to be for a local carpet company called, apparently, effing gee or effing G, involving the verb F or eff /ɛf/, an initialistic euphemism for fuck. Given my nature and my professional interest in taboo vocabulary, it would be fair to think of my perception as Freudian mishearing, of who knows what original. But, surely, a carpet company wouldn’t choose a name with fucking encoded in it, maybe playfully conveying that it was fucking good (though that would be a bold commercial move).
The next time I heard the ad, I understood the company name to be effigy, which is at least an English word (and not a swear), but baffling as a company name. Significantly, having heard the name originally as beginning with /ɛf/, that perception persisted.
Next time around, I shifted my perception to something more likely, in which /ɛf/ is in fact a letter name: FnG, that is F&G. This would be a common pattern in company names; a sampling of F&R companies:
F&R Auto Repair (Woodland CA), F&R Auto Sales (Hialeah FL), F&R Towing (San Jose CA), F&R Engineering (Roanoke VA), F&R American Fine Fragrance (Winston Salem NC)
Finally, I looked at the screen, and saw that the company’s name was indeed initialistic, but was S&R, not F&R. /f/ and /s/ are minimally distinct acoustically, so are often confused in perception. My initial perception was skewed towards /f/ because of my bias towards fucking — and so towards fucking and effing — and once established that perception persisted, despite repetitions of /s/.
Put on some pants, ranger!
September 14, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title: “Forestry Union Negotiations” — plays with the homophones bear and bare in a fresh way, turning on the fact that Smokey the Bear (in those American public service ads for fire safety) is in fact a National Park Service ranger (who happens also to be a talking bear), and so would be required to dress in ranger garb:
(#1) The cartoon, in which Smokey appears on duty with his shovel for fighting fires, but regrettably bare: sans hat and (AmE) pants — also shirt and boots (regulation NPS wear is a gray shirt and green pants) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Now: a little background on Smokey, followed by some other playing with bear and bare. (By the way, though these are homophones for many English speakers, including most Americans, there are English varieties in which they are distinct — but quite close phonetically, so the word play still works just fine.)
Cadbury’s puds
September 6, 2024On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:
It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …
Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:
The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name — is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces
Giving two figs, for science
August 14, 2024A delightful science-nerd cartoon manifested in several versions being passed around on the net. In my favorite, we’re given a science-illustrator’s b&w drawing of two (edible) figs in cross-section, labeled “fig 1.” and “fig 2.”:
(#1) The labels we expect are abbreviations for “figure 1.” and “figure 2.”: “fig. 1.” and “fig. 2.”. Instead, we get labels for two figs. Note that the drawings are illustrative figures and also of two figs — so the labels are a subtle graphic pun (“fig” punning on “fig.”)
