This fine New Yorker cartoon by Arnie Levin, sent to me by Sally Page Byers and Amanda Walker (along with an X-rated composition by Pierre et Gilles and an X-rated photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans; posting on Tillmans on AZBlogX, here):
(#1)
A play on the proverbial “An elephant never forgets”.
On Wednesday the Stanford QUEST group (queer staff and faculty) had our monthly happy hour, this time at Tacolicious in Palo Alto, a Mexican restaurant that not long ago replaced the Indian fusion restaurant Mantra (which succeeded the Japanese fusion restaurant Higashi West, which succeeded Old Uncle Gaylord’s Kosher Ice Cream Parlour, which I remember fondly from 30 years ago). (Restaurant turnover in Palo Alto is scandalous.)
Tacolicious is not just a taco place, but something trendier and more inventive. And crowded. And very noisy (probably by design, since the conversion from Mantra involved tearing out the entire interior of the restaurant and installing lots of reflective surfaces; noisy makes a restaurant “hot”).
This posting is going to be about the restaurant’s name. But first more on the place itself.
Today’s Zippy, with morphological play from Dingburgers:
One attested derived nominalization, contemplation from the verb contemplate; one over-extended derived nominalization, ingestation (rather that ingestion) from the verb ingest; one extremely over-extended derived nominalization, overindulgification (rather than overindulgence) from the verb overindulge; and one derived nominalization, donutitude. based on a noun (donut) rather than an adjective (as in similitude, based on similar) — each one more outrageous than the one before.
Today’s Zippy:
The strip is a lead-in to a pun so dreadful — the Holy Grill for the Holy Grail — that it’s wonderful. Then there’s the taco sauce theme and the snowlone let the X commence in the title.
As Hurricane Sandy advances on the East Coast of the U.S., a storm of playful morphology has developed in its wake, unleashing gales of the portmanteaus snowicane and frankenstorm.
A new comment on “Dubious portmanteaus” (from last July):
I know this is an older article but I was just thinking today how much I hate portmanteaus. I hate ‘fandom’ and ‘cosplay’. I also hate the word ‘kidlet’, although I’m not entirely certain that it is a genuine portmanteau. I asked some friends who are parents and they seemed to think it is a combination of kid and piglet.
Two things here: the rage at a whole class of words (in this case, at portmanteaus in general), and the three specific examples that set off the commenter’s rage: fandom, cosplay, and kidlet.
ADS-L discussion has recently taken up two recent formations in -ista: normalista on the tv show Veep and structuralista in Paul Krugman’s NYT column today. Both have the derogatory tone of English innovations with this suffix.
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.)
From several sources: repticide, reptard, danglology.