Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman looks at a recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon (also passed on to me by Paul Armstrong), in which a high school teacher, faced by thesaurisizing students, puckishly creates a fake thesaurus, only to have the students pick up her fancy-sounding inventions.
And a while back, Bruce Webster passed on to me a query about a recent book, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, full of (generally bad) “Don’t say that, Instead say this” advice.
In a recent Zippy, Griffy and Zippy manage to weave together telephone hassles and gastroenterology:
Once gasteroenterologists are in the conversation, Zippy lurches into the absurd phrasal overlap portmanteau intestinal tract house (intestinal tract + tract house), adding the absurd pseudonym Sigmoid Colon (predictably, the name has been used by others, in particular on the blog Sigmoid Freud: The life and views of a Forensic Psychiatrist).
Then there’s telephonoscopy, using the learnèd “combining form” (part compound element, part derivational suffix) -scopy. From Michael Quinion’s affixes site on the combining form:
-scope Also -scopic and -scopy.
An instrument for observing, viewing, or examining something.
[Greek skopein, look at.]This ending appears in the names of a wide variety of instruments in engineering, medicine, the sciences, and other fields, most containing the linking vowel -o- before the ending. All can have associated adjectives in -scopic, as in spectroscopic or gyroscopic. Many have a linked noun in -scopy that describes an observation or examination made using the instrument: laryngoscopy, endoscopy (among those in which that form is rare are kaleidoscope and periscope, in which names do not represent a scientific instrument).
The link between telephonoscopy (presumably ‘an examination made using the telephone’) and gastroenterology lies in the procedures of colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy (and endoscopy in general).
(Getting rid of your telephone, cutting it out of your life, would of course be telephonotomy.)
A Bizarro revision of the Three Wise Monkeys (“hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”):
Wait a minute! What are the three of them, taken together, saying to us?
A Zippy on art and writing:
(Earlier Zippy on cave painting here.)
The cave paintings tell a story — every picture tells a story, as they say — but not in words. As Griffy notes, the extraordinary cave paintings came long before there was written language. And even then, the earliest writing seems to have been used for pedestrian purposes (like marking property and keeping inventories); it was some time before we got to narratives, love letters, and all the good stuff. I wonder when jokes came into it.
So: fascinating art, but not yet stories in words. And no punch lines.
There are No e-Book Zones of Dingburg, where the locals appreciate the look and feel of book books:
For some time, Zippy strips have catalogued resistance to electronic media (as opposed to books and newspapers) in Dingburg and some acceptance as well:
“Memories of media past” (LLog 12/24/09) on newspapers
“Love of books in Dingburg” (AZBlog 2/12/10)
“The Saturday cartoon crop” (AZBlog 3/27/10)
“Actual vs. virtual” (AZBlog 2/20/11)
(A little bit about language, but mostly penguin stuff.)
From Michael Shaw in the New Yorker, 7/5/10, a cartoon illustrating that not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas:
Mark Liberman looked at the Happens In, Stays In snowclone in Language Log on 6/9/08, here. With a follow-up by Josh Millard on his own blog, here.
The penguins should have heeded this warning:
(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)
From the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. (2006):
It’ll (all) end in tears.
something that you say which means something will end badly and the people involved will be upset
She only met him in May and they were married by July. It’ll end in tears, you’ll see.
Really more of a saying or catchphrase than an idiom, but those are hard lines to draw.
(Link from Karen Davis) a Dinosaur Comics on modifier inflation over time and on portmanteaus (or portmanteaux):
Awesometastic looks like awesome with the libfix -tastic (though most of the -tastic examples have a noun as first element: carpet-tastic, scab-tastic, dicktastic, etc.). But then playful word formation is, well, inventive.
Brian Crane’s Pickles strip from June 15:
(Hat tip to Jon Lighter on ADS-L.)
Cankles for women, a fralp for men. The anatomical portmanteaus of aging.
Yesterday’s Zippy has the Dingburgers suffering from infections and other disorders caused by Too Much Information:
(Patent Graham Bell and Sharpie Tombo — the latter combining the names of two brands of pen — are entertaining names.)
Ah, the plague of TMI. As if the news media weren’t enough, there are the social media, blogs, Wikipedia and other sources, …It’s enough to make you sick.
Today’s Zippy, with several points of linguistic interest:
There’s Lasko, the Dingburg version of Lascaux. And the reversal in Burgdingus. And the rhyming name Ale, Quail & Email Society (what an unlikely assortment of interests!). And the art critics talking entirely in teenspeak (the truncated “I was, like, totally!” is especially nice). And the name Calvert Astroboy, which might be entirely made up or might be a play on a name I don’t recognize (I do have a friend who uses the handle Astroboy; he’s an astronomer). And, finally, the slang punked ‘ripped off’ (in this context; ‘tricked’ or ‘humiliated by being tricked’ in other contexts).