The event: the leprechaun has been murdered, with a porcelain figure. How to describe the event as concisely as possible? Today’s Rhymes with Orange strip shows us a police detective who can do it in three words. (And it’s been set to music!)
Archive for the ‘Nouning’ Category
The St. Patrick’s Day spriticide
March 21, 2021The signs of speechlessness
December 7, 2019What do you say to convey that you can’t find any words to describe your state of mind? What’s the verbal equivalent of the speechlessness emoji 😶 ? (Which literally has no mouth, indicating an inability to speak.)
Some people have conventional expressions for this purpose. Here’s one of them, homina, in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
As a cartoon bonus, we get the (metonymic) conversion of an expression evincing some state of mind — homina evincing bewilderment, surprise, or shock to the point of speechlessness — Â to a measure noun denoting a degree of the evinced state of mind — homina as a unit of bewilderment etc. A special sort of nouning, generally available for interjections:
I give that experience three eeks / ughs / ewws / ouches / …
Heavenly POP
October 18, 2019It’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.
Am I a bird?
July 4, 2019The 7/3Â Rhymes With Orange takes us to the Home for Aged Superheroes, where Superman is unsure of the volant creature he sees in the mirror and fears he’s going blind, or slipping into dementia (an unusually poignant theme for a cartoon):
(#1) In the land of the caped superheroes
bait and tackle
December 27, 2018A coordination of two nouns, conventionally paired in bait & tackle shop, referring to a store that provides supplies for sport fishermen. Like this place in Benicia CA:
(#1)
And elaborately played on in the Bizarro  from December 23rd:
Shake, shake, shake that death rattle
November 15, 2018Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-play has the two protagonists engaged in a heavy game of Cowboys and Indians:
(#1)
A play on two senses of rattle, denoting either a sound or a thing that makes a sound.
A delicious Jew
May 31, 2018A delicious Jew that would improve your dog’s joint health through glucosamine. Well, that’s what I heard, and it certainly made me sit up and take notice. So much so that I didn’t catch the name of the product being advertised on tv. There are a lot of possibilities; it might have been this one:
STIR FRYS
January 12, 2018From the recent Linguistic Society of America meetings in Salt Lake City, via Mike Pope, this sign in the window at the downtown restaurant Mollie & Ollie:
(#1)
Of linguistic note: the spelling STIR-FRYS — rather than STIR-FRIES — for the plural of the C[ount] noun STIR-FRY (most commonly spelled as hyphenated STIR-FRY, but occasionally solid STIRFRY or separated STIR FRY). This spelling preserves the identity of the base word FRY and so treats the noun STIR-FRY as an inviolable unit.
Off with their heads!
December 3, 2017Today’s new Page: an inventory of postings on the lexical process of beheading, which derives a noun ultimate ‘ultimate Frisbee’ (as in Sandy earned a varsity letter in ultimate) and a noun graveyard ‘graveyard shift’ (as in Terry has to work graveyard this week).
Follow-ups: t/d-deletion
November 16, 2017Following up on my posting on the 14th, “toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅”, two complex cases: dark fire tobacco, from Clai Rice’s recent fieldwork, as he reported on ADS-L yesterday; and t/d-deletion as a contributor to eggcorning.