Archive for the ‘Compounds’ Category
November 26, 2024
From Chris Ambidge (one of the Wardens of the Spheniscid Zarchives) on Facebook this morning:
(#1) [CA > AZ:] Arnold! Have you considered … penguin slippers? Keeping Feathers McGraw underfoot might be the best way to make sure he doesn’t get into mischief
From the Coddies website:
Coddies® Wallace & Gromit Feathers McGraw slippers:
Silent but villainous, Feathers McGraw is the ultimate plush slipper icon!
Slip into the soft embrace of Wallace & Gromit’s Feathers McGraw himself with Coddies’ new plush slippers, designed to capture the essence of Aardman’s criminal mastermind. They fit like a glove – not unlike the red rubber glove perched atop Feathers’ head – a disguise so brilliant in its simplicity that it once outwitted Wallace and even the local law enforcement.
(more…)
Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Language and food, Language in advertising, Movies and tv, Names, Penguins, Shoes, Trade names | 1 Comment »
November 24, 2024
(There will be mentions — in vernacular but not actually vulgar terms — of male-male sexual practices that some will find icky, so this posting will not be to everyone’s taste; and it might stretch some kids’ horizons a bit, so a gentle warning)
From back on 10/30, e-mail from Gadi Niram, with a video gift for me, saying: I found this video (and the young man in it) to be quite a pleasant diversion:
(#1) Screen shot from the video, which you can view here
A shirtless young man in ripped denim shorts playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No.2) on a fancy grand piano (with a mirrored fallboard, as in the finest piano lounges). alongside the pool at at what looks like a tropical oceanside resort. (For a bit of extra sexiness, those shorts are down far enough in the back to expose the waistband of his black Calvins; here the girls and the gay boys swoon.)
(more…)
Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Context, Conversion, Derivation, Language and the body, Language of medicine, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Music, Portmanteaus, Technical and ordinary language | 4 Comments »
November 15, 2024
Very briefly noted.
Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:
MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place
In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz. Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).
But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!
So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.
Posted in Art, Compounds, French, German, Greek, Language and animals, Language change, Latin, Placenames, Puns, Spanish | 3 Comments »
November 15, 2024
From Season Devereux this morning, this excellent image on Threads, from the poster linguisticdiscovery:
Two flying entities, the helicopter and the pterodactyl, are about to hybridize, to merge into a single thing, which will then obviously be denoted by the portmanteau helicopterodactyl — Is it a plane? (not exactly, though it’s a kind of aircraft) Is it a bird? (not exactly, though it has wings) It’s Superfly!
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »
October 30, 2024
(Publicity for a gay porn video, entertaining in its way but absolutely off-limits for kids and the sexually modest)
🎃 🎃 🎃 three jack-o’-lanterns for penultimate October, Halloween Eve (that is, the day before the day before the day of the dead) — in my house, the day when the pussyboys go out to seek their phallic prey
Into this scene comes this morning’s e-mail from the Falcon | NakedSword Store, offering:
Hot House movie download discounts — full movies $11.95 each
With, right at the top, the crudely pun-titled video Swim Meat and its cover illustration, offering four fine pieces of swim meat, one (Johnny V’s) just barely concealed by his swimwear; plus three proudly jutting tubesteaks that I’ve had to suppress for WordPress modesty (but here you can view the uncensored cover, along with the publicity text):
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Discourse organization, Gay porn, Holidays, Hyperbole, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
September 26, 2024
Complex ambiguities in the 9/25 comics: a Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange turning on the ambiguity of sham; and a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro turning on the ambiguity of tom:
(#1) sham conveying fraud, hence illegality; vs. sham for a decorative pillow cover (being manufactured in a small workshop, though note the suggestion in the title panel that the place might be a cover — ambiguity alert! — in the sense ‘an activity or organization used as a means of concealing an illegal or secret activity’ (NOAD) — but why are these pillow coverings called shams?
(#2) Personified, talking animals: two toms, a tomcat and a tom turkey, presented as characters named Tom, who work for the same company and are encountering one another over coffee, hence Wayno’s title “Breakroom Encounter” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Beheading, Comic conventions, Compounds, Conversion, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Personification, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
September 13, 2024
A delightful old Pearls Before Swine strip (from 12/27/07) that Jeff Bowles posted on Facebook this morning:
Pig understands drug-sniffing dog (as will most of us reading this) to refer to a dog that sniffs out drugs, detects / discovers them by its sense of smell, so as parallel to cadaver-sniffing dog; but it turns out that the dog in question actually sniffs — inhales — drugs to get high on them, so that Rat’s use of drug-sniffing dog is parallel to, say, glue-sniffing teenager (glue sniffing ‘the practice of inhaling intoxicating fumes from the solvents in adhesives’ (NOAD)) or snuff-sniffing aristocrat
So drug-sniffing dog is ambiguous — with two different meanings for the PRP-form synthetic compound drug-sniffing — and the strip plays with the ambiguity.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Context, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics of compounds, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »
September 12, 2024
So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Language and food, Language and politics, Linguists, Logos, Naming, Philosophy, Princeton, Psychology, Puns, Signage, Trade names | 2 Comments »
August 30, 2024
It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:
adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.
Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:
We quilt this city on a comfy roll.
Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:
Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.
Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.
What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.
(more…)
Posted in Compounds, Furnishings and tools, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Music, Parody, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »
August 25, 2024
Steven Levine on Facebook on 8/23, reporting in from an enormously crowded Minnesota State Fair, posted this cartoon t-shirt from the fair, with a note of distress:
(#1) SL: I find this t-shirt design to be disturbing. Shades of Charlie the Tuna.
(To which I added: Eat me!) I’ll get to Charlie the vorarephilic horse mackerel (and the Ameglian Major Cow, too) in a little while. But first, on fun-food corn dogs and cob-canine corn dogs.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
