Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category

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jackery at the jackery

May 13, 2024

(Playing around with English morphology and male masturbation, so not to everyone’s taste)

It all started with a chance encounter with an ad for Jackery portable power stations, like this one:

(#1)

Given the orientation of my imagination, I was immediately taken to the idea of jackery ‘male masturbation, jacking off’, at places especially devoted to the practice, jackeries (aka jack-off / jerk-off / JO clubs). Clearly not what the Jackery Company had in mind, but where did they get their name?

From the “get to know Jackery” page on the company’s website:

(#2)

Jackery was established in 2012 and co-founded by a former Apple senior engineer and a CEO called Z Sun, a pioneer in the field of Li-battery technology. The original founder developed a battery jacket for the Apple iPhone, which is where the name Jackery comes from.

… Jackery makes portable power stations, solar panels, solar generators, and accessories for the outdoor and mobile market, but they are best known for their portable power stations.

So Jackery has the derivational suffix –ery  (denoting ‘a place where some occupation, trade, or activity is carried on’) attached to an abbreviated form of jacket, referring to one of the company’s first products.

The details of words with the the noun-forming derivational suffix –ery are not at all straightforward, full of oddities of history; it’s not a particularly productive suffix. But there’s enough there that you can play with it.

On to this interesting messiness in some detail, and moving from battery jackets to male masturbation.

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Posted in Derivation, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Morphology, Names, Trade names | 3 Comments »

Annals of verbing: to get storrowed

May 10, 2024

A brief Friday delight, to which I was alerted by Gadi Niram on Facebook: a passive-only verbing based on a proper place name. In today’s CBS News from Boston, the story “3 trucks, including one from Trillium Brewing, get “storrowed” in one day on Storrow Drive”:

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Posted in Conversion, Music, Names, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Free-range folklore

May 5, 2024

… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:


(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Dance, Folklore, French, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Name that taqueria

April 29, 2024

From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.

Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.


(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here

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Posted in Grammatical gender, Language and food, Language in advertising, Libfixes, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Spanish, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

I am nobody’s pet!

April 27, 2024

So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:

Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).

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Posted in Derivation, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

Surely there’s a word for this

April 22, 2024

… many people’s reaction to the cartoon psychiatrist (in my 4/20 posting “Charlie on the couch”) admitting to her patient Charlie the StarKist tunafish:

you’re my first patient with a fear of not being eaten

Well, not an everyday word, but a specialized medical term, a bit of arcana from abnormal psychology.

There are, remarkably, two terms (one using the Latin ‘devour’ stem, one the corresponding Greek ‘eat’ stem) for ‘fear of being eaten’, so from these we can compose terms for ‘fear of not being eaten’.

Here you will object that this is a profoundly silly exercise; surely, such a term would have no utility in the real world. But no, there turns out to be a documented paraphilia centered on a erotic desire to be eaten (in the imagination), and in the world of this kink — very far from a top paraphilia, but a real thing —  fear of not being eaten, of not having this desire satisfied, would also be a real thing.

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Posted in Derivation, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology | Leave a Comment »

Briefly noted: Oceanic Opus

April 19, 2024

… Wayno’s title for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which I think of “MobyDicPOP”, to recognize the phrasal overlap portmanteau Moby Dictionary in it:


Moby Dick + dictionary (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

Easy to imagine other DicPOPs: Tricky Dictionary, for Richard Nixon’s pungent vocabulary of contempt and abuse; Private Dictionary, for the lexicon of private eyes; Pencil Dictionary, for a list of famous men with thin penises; and so on.

I suppose it’s merely caviling to note that a Moby Dictionary should be huge, and white.

 

Posted in Books, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | 3 Comments »

It’s that actor again

April 18, 2024

If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.

In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.

This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.

While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).

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Posted in Actors, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »

Everyday beheadings

March 29, 2024

For some time now, I’ve been collecting examples of a scheme of English derivational morphology I’ve called beheading, as in

crude (Adj) oil (N) -> crude (N), where the derived item crude ‘crude oil’ is a Mass N (like oil)

commemorative (Adj) stamp (N) -> commemorative (N), where the derived item commemorative ‘commemorative stamp’ is a Count N (like stamp)

A great many of the examples come from jargons, the vocabularies of specific occupational or interest groups, like people in the energy business or philatelists — or medical professionals (N attending ‘attending physician’), food preparers, servers, and sellers (N Swiss ‘Swiss cheese’), and so on. More generally, most beheadings are notably context-specific. But some come from everyday language and don’t need much contextual backing.

Here, after a somewhat more careful account of what beheadings are, I’ll add a few everyday beheadings to supplement the ones in my files (see the Page on this blog). Then I’ll veer all the way to the other pole and note that with enough contextual backing, completely novel beheadings can be coined and understood. Finally, I’ll cite the everyday beheading that inspired this posting: three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’, from US President Joe Biden, which I put off because some commenters took it — or, possibly, the idiom square meal itself — to be outdated, hence a sign of Biden’s being old and out of touch, a development that merited some discussion on its own. But there are plenty of cites, including a NOAD entry for the beheading square; and then all those comments vanished from the net, so I had no one to bash.

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Posted in Beheading, Context, Conversion, Jargon, Language and culture, Language and politics | Leave a Comment »

The Bizarro dog park

March 3, 2024

In today’s Bizarro, a dog park, with parking meters, where you can park your pooch by the hour:

Surprise! The strip exploits a possible sense of the N+N compound dog park — roughly, ‘an area or building where dogs may be left temporarily, for a fee’, the canine analogue of (largely British) car park ‘an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily; a parking lot or parking garage’ (NOAD) — that you probably had never imagined.

Instead, you expected the everyday sense of dog park, ‘a park for dogs to exercise and play off-leash in a controlled environment under the supervision of their owners’ (Wikipedia) — a Use compound with the general meaning ‘park for dogs (to use)’, but coming with a sociocultural context that in practice conveys something considerably more specific.

Now, more details on everyday dog parks, and Bizarro dog parks too.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Derivation, Language and animals, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »

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