Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category

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Menu madness

August 5, 2011

From an informant at a Silicon Valley company, some menu choices for lunch on Tuesday:

CLASSICS        The Sunnyvale: Cherry-Orange User-Generated Glazed Ham with Systems-Steamed Montebello Farms Broccoli and Unified Marketplace Macaroni and Cheese

PACIFIC RIM     The Beijing: Thai Basil Chicken or Soy Chicken Bytes with Computational Cashews

CIAO    The Santiago: Orzo Pasta PhDs with Traffic Shaping Tarragon Chicken Breast, Montebello Farms Green Beans, Ranking Red Bell Peppers, Algorithmic Almonds and Chardonnay-Dijon Cream

Computational cashews and algorithmic almonds. Alliteration run amok amidst relentless thematic word choice. User-generated glazed ham? Ranking red bell peppers?

 

Posted in Language and food, Language play | 2 Comments »

From the puns desk

August 3, 2011

Three puns that have come to the puns desk at AZBlog Plaza recently (not that the staff lacks for puns), plus a new book on puns.

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Posted in Books, Language play, Puns | 6 Comments »

Portmanteaus: boonerang

July 28, 2011

Mary Ballard (at Appalachian State University in Boone NC) writes to say that she and some friends (in Boone) have been discussing the word boonerang. An entertaining portmanteau combining Boone and boomerang, with local relevance via this rental cabin called “Boonerang”:

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Posted in Language play | 2 Comments »

Boldly going

July 27, 2011

From a Lands’ End e-mail ad received on July 17:

Subject: Boldly go where no Paintbrush has gone before.

(showing brightly colored broadcloth dress shirts in the Paintbrush line). A play on the Star Trek tag

To boldly go where no man has gone before

(with variants having no one and no person), referring to the exploration of space.

Then it turns out that there are huge numbers of playful variations on the Star Trek line, using the formula

Boldly go where no X has gone before

(some with the infinitive marker to, some not), all conveying X moving into some new territory. So: snowclone-like, but at the edge of the snowcloniverse, along with other playful variations on well-known fixed expressions.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language play, Puns, Snowclones | 4 Comments »

Sunday Punnies #16

July 25, 2011

Another Bizarro installment of puns:

On carpal tunnel, cell phone, and Toy Story, with the second really working only in spelling rather than speech.

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Inexplicated

July 22, 2011

A Zippy with the surprising verb inexplicate (in the past tense):

We start with the adjectives perplexing and inexplicable. Perplexing is based on the verb perplex. What, then, is the verb that inexplicable is based on? Obviously, inexplicate, the meaning of which is hard to, um, explicate.

(The semantics of perplexing and inexplicable are, of course, quite different, and the in- of inexplicable is a negative prefix associated with the adjective explicable rather than with the verb explicate. But Bill Griffith understood that.)

Posted in Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Playful morphology | Leave a Comment »

More on idioms

July 17, 2011

In a comment on my little posting on idioms this morning, Season Taylor linked to this t-shirt:

This is from the mental_floss store: Where knowledge junkies get their fix. They offer a wide variety of linguistically playful shirts and note cards, for example

HOMONYMS are a reel waist of thyme

and

Ambiguity: What happens in Vagueness stays in Vagueness

(with the Happens In, Stays In snowclone).

Posted in Idioms, Language play | 2 Comments »

Idioms: got your back

July 17, 2011

There’s a vein of language play, much mined by cartoonists, in which idioms are taken literally. Here from Cafe Press is an example that brightened my morning, because it plays on a convention of cartooning as well as a convention of language:

(Design by Stick figure t-shirts.) It comes in a variety of colors; here it is in (Stanford) cardinal.

Posted in Idioms, Language play | 3 Comments »

Clichéfest

July 13, 2011

Today’s Zippy, with a wave of mangled clichés:

I got “Fat chance”, “There’s strength in numbers”, “One good turn deserves another”, and “I’m on pins and needles”, plus “the wisdom of crowds” in the title, but I was momentarily stumped on lick Pawtucket (“kick the bucket”). The line between clichés and idioms is none too clear here.

(And note: “Scuffle, muffle, duffel, trick!”)

Conger on!

Posted in Clichés, Formulaic language, Language play, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Playing with morphology

July 13, 2011

From several sources: repticide, reptard, danglology.

(more…)

Posted in Combining forms, Danglers, Derivation, Language play, Libfixes, Morphology, Playful morphology | 1 Comment »

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