(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).
Yesterday’s Zippy:
I have a friend who has in fact assembled quite a collection of vivid vintage ties. But what especially caught my eye in this cartoon was space alien in the last panel.
#15 from Don Piraro:
The first is a straightforward phrasal overlap portmanteau (see my posting on Boomchickadee, with an inventory of POP postings). The last plays on the very close phonetic relationship of lawn and law ‘n’ (representing law and) — amounting to phonetic identity for some people some of the time.
Today’s Zippy:
“Bill Griffith” is an easy shot, but for “Zippy” we do indeed have: Zippy Shares (“online free file hosting”), Zippy Duck (a 6-1/2″ bag that closes with a zipper), and Scooter’s Zippy Pickles (of Pensacola FL). Plus lots of occurrences of the adjective zippy not in proper names.
(My dad’s nickname was Zip — from college days, when his friends said that he had lots of zip — but never Zippy. “Zippy” is a lot sillier than “Zip”.)
(No google hits for “Merwin Webcor”, by the way. Or for “Zip Zwicky”.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a wonderfully silly portmanteau:
Triceratops topiary, just the thing for the Stone Age front lawn.
He’s messing with words here, deliberately disregarding dishes as a label for a higher-level category of artifacts, as in do/wash the dishes (and in fact in compounds like dishwasher and dishcloth, where the first element dish is understood as a reference to this higher-level category; a dishwasher washes dishes in the broad, not the narrow, sense). Dishes are the central members of this category, but it includes a lot more than dishes.
