Archive for the ‘Libfixes’ Category
February 19, 2023
Following on yesterday’s posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, on a Rhymes With Orange cartoon about the cavewoman who invented the definite article (plus Caveman cartoons from Bizarro and Scott Hilburn), I recalled a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon that I’d been saving since 2021, a cartoon in which Cro-Magnons are viewed as step up from Neanderthals:
(#1) Dining at the Restaurant La Cave, back in the days when Neanderthals shared Europe with the upstart Cro-Magnons
Larson produced a huge number of Neanderthal cartoons in the 15 years of The Far Side, 6 more of which I’ll reproduce below. They’re all set in Caveman locales, with characters that are Cavemen in appearance and dress but otherwise are engaged in social relationships and cultural practices from late 20th-century America — in #1, the two men are vying for the attentions of a woman, the old-fashioned Neanderthal (rubbing sticks together to make fire) pitted against the slick new Cro-Magnon (using a cigarette lighter).
#1 is complex in its handling of the dual nature of its characters, who are simultaneously cavepeople and modern Americans. The larger setting is in a cave (with a cave painting of a deer on the wall), but, more specifically, two of the characters are sitting at a table at a little restaurant while the third brandishes that cigarette lighter.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and food, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
October 30, 2022
(There will be some digressions into vulgar sexual slang and explicit descriptions of sex acts, so some sections of this posting are not recommended for kids or the sexually modest.)
Adventures on Facebook that start with cheese balls and then branch to the coinages giggalicous and snickerfacient. So things are pretty much all over the map. I set things off on FB with this message, which mingles all three topics :
— AZ on 10/26: I find it giggalicious that some company is offering “dairy-free cheese balls”. But I am admittedly easily amused, to the point where I have always found “cheese balls”, all by itself, to be snickerfacient.
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Posted in Double entendres, Figurative language, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Libfixes, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 18, 2022
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:
(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Language of sex, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mascots, Masculinity, Metaphor, Metonymy, Portmanteaus, Signs and symbols, Snowclonelet composites, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »
April 28, 2022
From Nancy Friedman on her Fritinancy site (“Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce”) on 4/25, “Word of the week: Bookchella”:
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, first held in 1996, returned to the USC campus last weekend after a two-year Covid hiatus. Because April 22 through 24 was also the final weekend of this year’s Coachella Music Festival, held 130 miles away in Southern California’s Colorado Desert, someone — maybe the person in charge of the Times’s Twitter feed — decided it would be cute to call the literary festival #Bookchella.
And just like that, –chella became the new –stock: a portable suffix denoting “festival.”
Except it wasn’t exactly “just like that.” And watch your back, LATFOB: the music festival in the desert has a history of refusing to give up its –chella without a legal fight.
Some linguistic background first. The –chella in #Bookchella operates as a “libfix” (liberated affix), as the linguist Arnold Zwicky dubbed such word parts, which are also known as productive bound morphemes. Tack –chella onto the end of another word and you communicate “festival.” For decades now, –stock, clipped from Woodstock, has played a similar role. (Read my 2013 article about “X-stock.”) Other well-known libfixes include –gate for any scandal and –preneur for any independent businessperson. (More libfixes here; read my 2014 article about –preneur compounds here.)
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Posted in Language and the law, Libfixes, My life | Leave a Comment »
September 5, 2021
It started with an ad (on my Facebook page yesterday) from the Ron Dorff company (previously unknown to me) that struck me for its reserved erotic message:
(#1) [from the accompanying text:] The very first fragrance by Ron Dorff [Paris – Stockholm] Discipline Sport Pour Homme: Fresh, clean, and refreshing, the perfect reinvigorating scent after a tough session at the gym. Get $10 off the full-size bottle.
Notes on the photo. A handsome, “naturally” well-muscled (rather than gym-ripped) young man, shot in soft focus, wearing only a standard white gym towel, resting his arms against his legs (touching his body — this is significant). His haircut is conventional. His face is very lightly scruffy, his body utterly smooth and dry, almost ethereally beautiful: an idealized beautiful male body. The towel, however, is fastened to make a V pointing towards his crotch; and a small bottle of Ron Dorff Discipline Sport is tucked into it, pointing up, so that it mimics an erect — reinvigorated — penis peeking above the towel.
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Posted in Libfixes, Masculinity, Underwear | 2 Comments »
August 26, 2021
(Generally on the raunchy side, though not actually obscene — but too heavy with sex toys (including some truly alarming dildos) and anal talk for kids and the sexually modest, who should stay away.)
Very late for one of my favorite holidays, National Underwear Day (8/5), this Daily Jocks ad on 8/25:
(#1) [ad copy:] Get party ready with the DJX Trough Jockstrap. Featuring a dual-layered breathable pouch, which is as soft to the touch as it is enhancing. You won’t want to take these off. [oh honey, yes you will, yes you will]
First, some AMZ verse; then an olla podrida of neon pink jockstrap-related topics.
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Posted in Color, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Libfixes, Masculinity, Metaphor, Poetry, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 26, 2021
In the One Big Happy strip from 4/30, Ruthie explains, impishly, that there’s a name for her grandma’s special brand of perceptiveness:
Even better, that name rhymes with the historical model for nouns in –dar, denoting ‘the ability to detect some quality’ (like having dyed gray hair)
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Posted in Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Rhyme | 1 Comment »
July 19, 2020
Today, Zippy returns to Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA (last visited in 2016), where he concludes that “Life is an endless panorama of o-rama word endings”:
(#1)
Against a background of the inventive food establishment name Burg-O-Rama, Zippy cites early examples of –orama words that served as the models for the development of the libfix -((o/a)r)ama.
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Posted in Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
January 3, 2020
Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:
(#1)
I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.
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Posted in Cartoon conventions, Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Language and animals, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Penguins, Snowclones | 5 Comments »
September 6, 2019
The 9/3 Pearls Before Swine:
(#1)
Great big themes:
anti-intellectualism: the distrust of, and rejection of, learning;
the ignorance of the young, elevated to a form of resolute stupidity;
mass hysteria: the amplification of irrational beliefs and behaviors in crowds
All packaged into dumbnado, with the libfix –nado, that entertaining pop-cultural product of the Sharknado movies.
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Posted in Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Portmanteaus | 2 Comments »
