That would be sebum, which led me almost immediately to semen and smegma: /s/-initial disyllables with accent on the first syllable that refer to bodily secretions.
Archive for the ‘Derivation’ Category
Secretive morning name
March 29, 2018Off 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).
Guess I’ll go eat worms
November 26, 2017A follow-up to my posting on the 23rd, “Two Thanksgiving meals”, in which one of the meals had as its main dish vermicelli Singapore-style, with rice vermicelli as the base. So now I’m all about vermicelli.
Warming up to the pasta topic, let’s consider Zesty Anderson Davis consuming some string pasta made from wheat:
(#1) #2 in a 6/23/13 posting, showing Zesty AD sucking up worms (well, spaghetti) in a panoply of sexual imagery
(#2) Abasement, comfort food, or oral sex?
Environmentally responsible derivation
November 13, 2017It starts with an ordinary noun source and an ordinary verb sustain and eventually works its way to the adverb sustainably as a modifier of a verb source, strikingly in the split infinitive construction to sustainably source, which Wilson Gray reported in an ADS-L posting on the 11th, citing a General Mills ad in which to sustainably source oats figures prominently.
From the great Anatomic War
November 8, 2017Q: Did they ever have anatomic war?
A: Have you never heard of the great Anatomic War and one of its signal encounters, the 1346 Battle of Extremities, in which the Phalanges, with their long bones, overwhelmed the armored Carpals and Metacarpals?
(#1) Phalanges shooting down the Carpal and Metacarpal forces
Attenuative morphology
November 5, 2017From a posting to the Linguistic Typology list, a proposal for a workshop on Attenuated qualities in a cross-linguistic perspective, beginning attenuatively:
Our smallish-to-middling workshop focusses on the diverse morphological and lexical means of expressing attenuation (reduced degree of a quality) in the languages of the world.
More of the proposal to follow. First, a few notes on two more familiar grammatical categories related to attenuatives.
Herons in the garden
October 30, 2017Came by on Pinterest some considerable time ago, a photo billed as “Gartenkeramik Reiervogel – ein Designerstück von Brigitte Peglow”, showing a ceramic bird posing in a luxuriant garden, much like this:
(#1) Ceramic bird among variegated vinca, hostas, ferns, and more
Certainly looked like a heron, but I was puzzled by the German noun Reier.
Revisiting 9: ¡-ola!
October 22, 2017A comment on the vulgar noun crapola in yesterday’s posting “A portmantriple”, from David Preston:
[cited by AZ] “-ola, a suffix used humorously to extend standard words.”
Wasn’t the original ‘ola’ the shoe-polish brand Shinola? Then it became humorous with the phrase “know shit from Shinola.”
Actually, playful -ola didn’t start with Shinola, though Shinola appeared fairly early in the history.
-izing the dog
August 23, 2017
Trailers
June 13, 2017… in NOAD2’s third sense:
3 a thing that trails, especially a trailing plant.
The occasion was an errand-running walk in Palo Alto a little while ago with Kim Darnell, on which we came across a plant I identified as a fuchsia, remarking that they were often planted in hanging baskets, where their down-hanging flowers spilled attractively over the sides of the basket:
(#1)
