Yesterday’s and today’s Bizarro strips:
(#1)
(#2)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoons — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in both strips — see this Page.)
Archive for the ‘Synthetic compounds’ Category
1 Bizarro, 2 Bizarro
May 25, 2017Chub and chums in the morning
April 17, 2017Yesterday’s morning name was chub (the name of a fish), which led me to the rest of the bilabial-final family: chum, chump, and chup. (And that led to the velar-final family chug, Chung, chunk, chuck, but I won’t pursue that one here.) As it is, the bilabials will lead us into many surprising places, including the Hardy Boys books, eyewear retainers, Australian dog food, gay slurs, and hunky underwear models.
News for penises: a friend request
March 11, 2017(Well, yes, men’s bodies, sex talk, and man-man sex. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
A friend request on Facebook, from someone using the name Nick Petersucker (some time ago, FB obviously ceased to care a great deal about its policy of insisting that posters use their real names; now, all sorts of remarkable names come past me on FB). His profile picture, a selfie of someone, first posted in 2012:
(#1)
Understanding the comics
February 22, 2017Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:
(#1)
(#2)
The family that fund-raises together
January 17, 2016From a Gail Collins column “Everything’s Relative” in the NYT on the 14th, about political candidates engaging their families in their campaigns:
Remember Jeb? He was going to run as his own man, but people on the campaign mailing list are getting requests for donations from George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, George P. Bush and Columba Bush [Jeb’s father, brother, mother, son, and wife, respectively]. The family that fund-raises together stays together.
Collins chose to use the 2-part back-formed V (2pbfV) fund-raises rather than the phrase raises funds, and (though a fair number of people, including some language critics, are deeply hostile to 2pbfVs, as unnecessary innovations) in my opinion that was an excellent choice: fund-raises describes an activity that is more unitary, and more specific, than raises funds. There’s a distinction here that’s come up on this blog several times, and there’s also a general principle at work, a principle I’ll call Structural Tightness.
PSP synthetic compounds
July 31, 2015From Ned Deily on Facebook, this report in the Advocate of the coming-out of Lutheran Bishop Kevin Kanouse at a youth conference:
Kanouse recounted the experience in a letter to local leadership, which was published online this week. In the document, he wrote he was “Holy Spirit-moved to tell my own story publicly, for the first time,” after hearing the emotional stories recounted by young people at the conference, concerning the role of God in their lives.
The point of linguistic (rather than gay) interest here is the PSP synthetic compound Holy Sprit-moved ‘moved by the Holy Spirit’, with the PSP in passive function.
Morphology Friday 2: back-formed freedom-fight
October 3, 2014Today’s Doonesbury blast from the past:
Start with the synthetic compounds freedom fighter and freedom fighting. From which by back-formation comes a verb to freedom-fight, of the form N + V. Which then has a PST using the PST of its head fight: freedom-fought. Voilà.
pickles
August 24, 2013Just posted on “Men and their pickles”, which brings me to (actual) pickles and (figurative, sexual) pickles. It’s well in advance of National Pickle Day (November 14th), but here’s a pile of (cucumber) pickles to tide you over:
(#1)
Annals of back-formation
August 7, 2013Two recent contributions, of different sorts, from friends: to truck-chase and to harsh-parent.
