Archive for the ‘Synthetic compounds’ Category

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Heavenly POP

October 18, 2019

It’s been about ten days since the last POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) here — a 10/9/19 posting “Two old cartoon friends”, with doctors without border collies — so, on the theory that regular POPs are good for the mind and the spirit, today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, at the very gates of heaven:

pearly gates + gate-crasher

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Appreciating the cartoon requires that you be familiar with the pop-culture story (whose source is the Christian Bible) of St. Peter at the pearly gates to heaven; that you be familiar with the belief (spread by an 1989 animated movie) that all dogs go to heaven; that you know the idiomatic synthetic compound gate-crasher; and that you know the idiomatic nouning plus-one. That’s a lot of cultural stuff.

(more…)

Posted in Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nouning, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Pop culture, Proverbs, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

shaker of salt

August 26, 2019

Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo:


(#1) A parade of unidiomatic prepositional alternatives (with the P of) to the synthetic compounds cheese grater, nutcracker, meat cleaver, egg timer

(Wayno’s title: “Rhyme & Punishment”; see comments below)

To understand the relevance of these nominals, you need to know not only who Jimmy Buffett is and that his most famous song is the notoriously ohrwurmisch “Margaritaville”, you actually need to know a crucial couplet from the song:

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Semantics of compounds, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | 5 Comments »

V-headed compounds

March 27, 2018

I’ll start with the seasonally relevant compound verb to snow blow / snow-blow / snowblow and go on from there to an animus, in some quarters, against such V-headed compounds (on the grounds that they are unnecessary innovations, because the language already has syntactic means for expressing their meanings — in this case, to blow (the) snow away from).

(#1)

(more…)

Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Conversion, Idioms, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Morphology, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | 1 Comment »

to pizza-make

December 26, 2017

Another chapter in the story of synthetic compounds and 2pbfVs, most recently treated (at some length) in my 12/23 posting “they kitchen-kissed again”. The new datum came to me from Mike Pope, who found it in a piece on the Ozy site, “The World’s Most Beloved Food is Under Serious Threat” by Silvia Marchetti on 9/28/16, where I’ve boldfaced the 2pbfV to pizza-make (in its PRS form):


Gamal, an Egyptian pizza chef in the Rome neighborhood of Ostia (link)

When you stop by for a quick lunch at a pizzeria in Rome, you expect to see Roman or Neapolitan chefs in front of brick ovens throwing pizzas in the air to give them that roundish shape. Today, though, the pizza makers you encounter are more likely to be Egyptian, Pakistani and Indian, who pizza-make with sublime artistry. In fact, according to Confcommercio, Italy’s food retail association, 2 out of 5 pizza makers in Italy are Egyptian or Moroccan.

But there are still aren’t enough hands to make dough into discs: The country that invented the world’s most heavenly flatbread, says Confcommercio, needs 6,000 pizza chefs.

Why pizza-make, and not make pizza? Both are possible; the second is stylistically unremarkable, while the first is notable; the first is a word (albeit a compound), while the second is a syntactic phrase; and they are truth-functionally equivalent, but the first implicates something beyond the semantic content that they share — that the making of pizza is framed as a distinctive, unitary activity, involving the pizza-maker directly and essentially. Anybody can make pizza, but it takes someone special  — an expert, a craftsman, a professional, someone like Chef Gamal — to pizza-make. (more…)

Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

they kitchen-kissed again

December 23, 2017

A Xmas data-gift from Larry Horn, from a novel (Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You (2001)) about an affair between an undergraduate and her universty TA. The two excerpts Larry sent are, in his words,

separated by various (recoverable) activities, but the reader is expected to remember what had gone on between the lovers on pp. 93-94 [They kissed in the lit kitchen] when she gets to pp. 99-100 [They kitchen-kissed again].

So, in the latter: the verb to kitchen-kiss, either a 2pbfV (a 2-part back-formed V) based on the (well-attested) synthetic compound kitchen-kissing ‘kissing in the kitchen’ or a verbing of the (also well-attested) N + N compound kitchen-kiss ‘a kiss in the kitchen’. It turns out that kitchen-kissing and kitchen kisses are a (sociocultural) thing, which has attracted websites, Pinterest boards showing the activity, and the like — so it’s no surprise that there’s a one-word (compound) verb referring to the activity.

(more…)

Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Pragmatics, Semantics, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

The post-Thanksgiving news from 52 years ago

November 27, 2017

News you can sing!

Passed on by Virginia Transue, this story from the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield MA:

52 years ago (Nov. 29, 1965) the Berkshire Eagle printed a little article about two young men being fined 25 bucks for dumping trash. Little did we know at the time that the incident, which ran on page 25, would become the basis for Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Here’s our original story from 1965:

(#1) The genesis of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”

(more…)

Posted in Music, My life, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Household gifts

October 21, 2017

Assembled in a group photo, three pleasingly thoughtful household gifts:

(#1) A penguin tea towel and a purple plant mister flanked by two hand-blown flared glasses

The tea towel with penguin slogan (the penguin is one of my totem animals) brought back from the New England Aquarium (in Boston) for me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. The purple plant mister given to me by Kim Darnell (who found them on-line) to mist my mini-phal (which likes high humidity, but not wet roots). The flared glasses blown by Amanda Walker, who made them for me so I could grasp them firmly with my damaged right hand..

A little festival of household furnishings and English N + N compounds as well: tea towel, distantly related to tea (referring to the hot drink made from the leaves of the tea plant); the synthetic AGT compound plant mister; the synthetic PSP compound hand-blown; and the compound punty mark, the (totally opaque) name Amanda gave to the glassy scars at the bottom of the glasses.

And, oh yes, the idiom in the tea towel slogan. Let’s start with that.

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Idioms, Language and plants, My life, Penguins, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Another prohibition on tipping

July 4, 2017

Yesterday’s posting on cow-tipping and related matters distinguished two verbs tip, played with in a cartoon by Daniel Beyer:

(1) give (someone) a sum of money as a way of rewarding them for their services

(3) overbalance or cause to overbalance so as to fall or turn over

and provided a joke sign prohibiting cow-tipping. There are of course also NO TIPPING signs, usually in restarants, prohibiting gratuities.

Now Benita Bendon Campbell reminds me of NO TIPPING signs in the UK that often baffle American visitors because they appear along roads, in places where gratuities would seem to be irrelevant. There are variants that show that a third verb tip is at issue here, one related to the

noun tip: British a place where trash is deposited; a dump. (NOAD2)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Back formation, Books, Language and food, Signs and symbols, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

1 Bizarro, 2 Bizarro

May 25, 2017

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.)

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Synthetic compounds, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Chub and chums in the morning

April 17, 2017

Yesterday’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.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Address terms, Dialects, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, Morning names, Slang, Syntax, Synthetic compounds, Underwear | 1 Comment »

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