Archive for the ‘Libfixes’ Category

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Deviant Passover rites

March 30, 2018

A follow-up to my posting of the 28th, “Deviant Last Suppers”, about queer travesties of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a painting of the communal meal (celebrated on Maundy Thursday, yesterday this year) that Christians understand as the origin of the eucharist, or communion, ritual (take, eat, this is my body; take, drink, this is my blood). Now after sunset today, the Jewish ritual communal meal, the Passover seder, with its symbolic retelling of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. So, Bill Stewart wondered in a comment on this blog, what about a queer seder?

Well, sort of.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and religion, Language play, Libfixes, Playful morphology, Puns, Signs and symbols, Snowclonelet composites | 9 Comments »

I Was a Cock-Teaser for Roosterama!

March 19, 2018

(There will be plain talk of men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest. On the other hand, there’s a lot of playfulness.)

A brief routine from the Firesign Theatre, the fourth track on their compendium album Dear Friends (2001); you can listen to it here. The album has routines from the comedy troupe’s radio shows — highly improvisatory, veering in odd directions in a virtual haze of pot smoke.

It started with some Dick Danger gay porn, which led to the Firesign Theatre and their “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”, which took me to the cock-tease bit. That then took me to more gay porn, Raging Stallion’s 2013 Cock Tease, and to uses of cock tease / cock-tease / cocktease in general and on this blog.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Humor, Language of sex, Libfixes, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

The penguins are coming, the penguins are coming

February 1, 2018

Into the chasm between Penguin Awareness Day (January 20th) and Groundhog Day (February 2nd) springs this warning cry on Doctor Anna’s Imaginarium page on Facebook:


Wake up sheeple! The penguins are coming!

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Posted in Libfixes, Penguins, Silliness | 1 Comment »

More Zippy-O-Rama

August 15, 2017

Today’s Zippy takes us through three commercial establishments with (variants) of –orama names, while fretting ambivalently about American patriotism:

(#1)

Wein-O-Rama (Cranston RI), Billy’s Burg-O-Rama (Oxford MA), and Liquorama (stores with that name in many locations), plus Zippy’s own coining, Shrink-O-Rama. As it happens, Bill Griffith has used the imagery in #1 for at least one other strip, which I posted on Language Log on 1/20/07:

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Posted in Language play, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Playful morphology, Portmanteaus, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

Two European estates in America

August 14, 2017

The Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores MI (which brings us a satisfying instance of the –palooza libfix); and the Castello di Amorosa near Calistoga CA (which offers a range of California wines and also Belgian-style chocolate). The first designed to reproduce the vernacular architecture of the English Cotswolds, the second a fantasy re-creation of an Italian castle.

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Posted in Architecture, Language and food, Libfixes, Names | Leave a Comment »

stans

March 1, 2017

One more item from my blog backlog, this one starting with a January 2nd op-ed column in the NYT by Paul Krugman, “America Becomes a Stan”, which began:

In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country’s president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists.

Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now?

We are, after all, about to [remember that this was published on January 2nd] hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his “charitable” foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?

I don’t mean to slight the social and political message here — that our country risks becoming a gold-plated failed-state autocracy — but this posting is mostly about the linguistic point, the appearance of the independent word stan, extracted from English names of regions and political entities with the libfix -(i/y)stan, originally an element in such names in other languages but now available for forming new names in English.

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Posted in Language in politics, Libfixes | 4 Comments »

The carniguin

January 5, 2017

On Facebook, this came from Michael Palmer, who got it from Seth Andrew. (As with many such things, the creators of the image and the text are not identified.)

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Posted in Language and animals, Libfixes, Penguins, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Briefly: early libfixology

November 20, 2016

Back to the 1940s. Ben Zimmer writes to report that going through back issues of American Speech, he came across a couple of articles discussing what we would now call “libfixes”; Harold Wentworth called them “neo-pseudo-suffixes”:

Harold Wentworth, “The Neo-Pseudo-Suffix ‘-eroo'”, American Speech, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb., 1942), pp. 10-15 (link)

Dwight L. Bolinger, “Among the New Words”, American Speech, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 301-305 (link):

Long lists have been compiled of words formed out of what Harold Wentworth calls neo-pseudo-suffixes. ANW has commented on a number of these, including –cast, -burger, -legger, -aroo, and others. How deeply the habit of dissecting words in American English may be seen perhaps better, however, in those suffixes of which there are but a few scattered examples and which have yet to become popular. Herewith are listed a number of them, which also meet the condition of not being independent words used in some nonce-combination (such as busting or fest).

Only two items on the list have survived: from icicle, Popsicle; from photogenic, telegenic.

Posted in Libfixes | Leave a Comment »

think of the Xs

April 19, 2016

Start with my 3/31 posting “A kitten-killing God?”, where I looked at a slogan (and caption for an image), with the crucial part bold-faced:

Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Please think of the kittens.

A formulaic pattern Please think of the Xs (with minor variants: Think of the Xs!, Won’t someone (please) think of the Xs?, Won’t anyone think of the Xs? What about the Xs?) — some sort of snowclone, call it Think Of The Xs, exhorting the addressee to stop some activity, on the grounds that it does some damage to the Xs or sets a bad example for the Xs. Nancy’s comment on this posting of mine:

Not wank-related, but “Catmageddon,” the new anti-smoking ad campaign from Truth, makes the following equation: “SMOKING = NO CATS = NO CAT VIDEOS.” Think of the cats!

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Posted in Formulaic language, Libfixes, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

Zip-O-Rama

April 9, 2016

Today’s Zippy takes us to Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA.

(#1)

The strip is “about” politics (insofar as a Zippy is “about” anything), but this posting is about the libfix -((o/a)r)ama ‘display, spectacle, something really major’. And about food, starting with burgers (and clams and fish & chips).

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Posted in Language and food, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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