Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category
April 22, 2025
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
The Bizarro of 4/11, as US income tax day (4/15) was approaching; Wayno’s title: “Ax Deductions” (playing on tax deductions):
(#1) The ax-wielding Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz film confronts (with his characteristic facial expression) a special federal income tax form for metal filers, with an eccentric portmanteau name, Form 10-W40 (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
To come: very briefly, the Tin Man in the film; the contributors to the portmanteau word 10-W40; this portmanteau in a partial taxonomy of types of portmanteau words (it’s a sharing right portmanteau).
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Posted in Language play, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »
April 19, 2025
[4/25 disclaimer. In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
“… and a shallow nonstick skillet”: Wayno’s title for today’s Bizarro egg-related cartoon:
(#1) Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can’t get up; it’s omelet time in Wonderland (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Ordinary chicken eggs are currently going for $12 a dozen at my local Safeway, so HD would be worth a small fortune.
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Posted in Art, Books, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry, Puns | 1 Comment »
April 17, 2025
From Emily Menon Bender on Facebook today, with a bit of the menu at the restaurant Medici in Normal, in Normal IL:
[with EMB’s comment:] I’d keep making these puns too if I lived here
This following on a passing reference in my posting yesterday “Me lookee, no findee” to Kutztown State Normal School (as it was when I was a child), a state-supported teachers college in Kutztown PA, now Kutztown State University (that’s Kutz rhyming with puts, by the way; if you pronounce it to rhyme with putts, then in Pa. Dutch English, you’re talking about Barftown)
And with #1 echoing a famous headline announcing:
Oblong Man Marries Normal Woman
Oblong is a village in Crawford County IL. And Normal (as in #1) is a town in McLean County IL.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Names, Puns, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
April 13, 2025
[In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
Jim Horwitz’s Watson cartoon for 4/9 (it came to me on Facebook, which has its own peculiar ways of delivering postings, today, 4/13):
Ingeniously outrageous: Batman and Robin turned into food containers
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
April 6, 2025
On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline
How to shame a dictator
(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)
The gripes of Roth
(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).
And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.
(more…)
Posted in Allusion, Books, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Quotations, Rhyme, Titles | 4 Comments »
April 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin
Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:
(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke
Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Quotations | 1 Comment »
March 31, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:
the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).
From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)
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Posted in Cartoonists, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Semantics | 2 Comments »
March 17, 2025
☘️ ☘️ ☘️ three shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day
On the WaynoBlog for 3/15/25, W commented on the Bizarro cartoon of his that I reported on in my posting yesterday, “Nosferatu en pointe”:
I recently saw another vampire cartoon with the caption NOSFERATUTU. Worse, it was done by a good friend, Teresa Roberts Logan, who has an excellent cartoon feature called Laughing Redhead. Worse still, she did her comic in 2021! At least the two aren’t precisely the same…
Fortunately, she was very understanding about this type of occurrence, which happens to all of us from both directions. It’s still embarrassing, though!
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Posted in Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 16, 2025
After six days of foolishness, back on 1/19, in my posting “Hats off to vampires!”, Bizarro produced what I supposed to be the last of the Waynoratu Nosferamanteaus. But yesterday (3/15), two months later, the vampire arose once more, dancing across the stage of our imagination:
I suppose this was irresistible, but the TU of Nosferatu beckons far too seductively (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
We might now get
Nosferatuber, Nosferatumor, Nosferatush, Nosferatutor, Nosferatutti-fruitti, …
NosferaTurin, NosferaTuring, NosferaTurkey, NosferaTuscany, NosferaTutsi, …
And endless more, streaming out the door and flying bat-like towards the moon.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
