… 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)
It started with Chris Hansen posting this London bus ad on Facebook:
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On the bus:
IT’S SMOOTHIFIED.
WE’RE AMERICAN.
WE CAN MAKE UP WORDS.NOW IN THE UK
So: about the morphology; about the advertising tactic; and about the beer.
Emily Rizzo then threw this into the mix:
(#2)
with chelada (a variant of michelada), a type of beer cocktail — that is, a mixed drink with beer as one of its ingredients.
#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
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baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
Two caterpillar notes, an old one and a very recent one.
First, from a Language Log posting of mine from 6/2/06:
As for the oak moths, we’ve been exceptionally afflicted by them this spring at Stanford — a rain of caterpillars [California Oakworms, Phryganidia californica], then masses of cocoons, and now clouds of moths. Ick. Susie Fork [posting on the Elkhorn Slough site], however, sounds pretty pro-moth. Well, the Elkhorn Slough staff seem to value all the organisms they study. But then they don’t have to live with clumps of cocoons disfiguring the pieces in the New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the way we do.
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Then from a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden last week:
(#2)
Today’s Zippy (for a change, not alluding in any way to POTUS):
Zippy and Griffy are headless in Hyannis, or somewhere. Headless and therefore mindless. They are briefly Zippyized in panel 3, where they are subject to Martinization and Sanforization, before Zippy urges them in the last panel to return to their everyday identities (like vampires or werewolves, they change back at dawn), and Griffy commits a very silly pun (close-minded / clothes-minded).
The Bizarro from 1/6/16:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
But elephantitis would refer to an inflammation of the elephant. And elephantiasis is an actual (dreadful) disease. Maybe elephantosis would cover the condition depicted in the cartoon.
Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to a convenience store, whose name communicates speedy service and also seems to refer to him (so that he takes a proprietary interest in the business):
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Four in my comics feed Sunday morning: a One Big Happy with the derived adjective quotatious; a Zippy on pangrams; a Mother Goose and Grimm with an ambiguity in marine biologist; and a Doonesbury nominally about pronoun choices, but about much more.
Following up on yesterday’s posting “No cigar”, on a Tom Chitty cartoon with phallic foodstuffs striving to become cigars, two items: You’re no Cigar (Lloyd Bentsen: You’re no Jack Kennedy) and Sometimes a cigar is a lot more than a cigar (apocryphal Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).
More home decor, this time in a report on Peninsula Furniture Moving Day, which was two Sundays back. The basic strategy: take Jacques’s fold-up Scandinavian desk (of rosewood) from Ramona St. to a consignment shop in Sunnyvale; move the big oak desk from Staunton Ct. to Ramona, to replace Jacques’s desk there; move the big CD carousel (solid cherry, originally from Levenger) to Staunton Ct., from which it can be sold or donated. Later, move a small bookshelf from Staunton Ct. to replace the CD carousel; acquire a desk organizer and a swing-arm desk lamp for the oak desk; and finish removing the contents of my Stanford office (now given up) for recycling or for processing at Ramona St. The result was a gigantic task of sorting and storing, still in progess.
Meanwhile, here’s the oak desk (originally from the study in my Columbus OH house, now in my Ramona St. bedroom), with accessories:
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(Large “memory collages” on the wall, plus the Jacques and Arnold wedding-equivalent photo from 1996.)
